Think about a pencil. You have used hundreds. You cannot picture a single one. No one keeps a pencil, mourns a pencil, or audits a pencil. It is produced by the billion and consumed without ceremony. The pencil is not the point. The writing is.

This is what mass production does to a good: it strips the individual unit of memory. When something is abundant and cheap enough, the unit stops being a thing you value and becomes a thing you flow. The value does not disappear. It migrates from the unit to the stream.

The digital version is worse

An ad impression is a pencil. A page view is a pencil. A bid request is a pencil. Each is manufactured and consumed at a scale no human can hold in mind, so we do the natural thing. We stop looking at units and start looking at aggregates. Totals, averages, CPMs, dashboards. The flow.

• When units are memorable, you audit units. You notice a bad one.
• When units are disposable, you audit only the flow. You notice a bad average, if it is bad enough to move the total.
• Fraud lives in the gap: bad units that never move the average because they are hidden in the volume.

No one counterfeits a single pencil. You counterfeit the pencil factory, and you get paid by the truckload.

Shailin Dhar

The lesson is not to go back to counting units. That is impossible at internet scale, and pretending otherwise sells software that does not work. The lesson is to stop trusting the flow just because the units are too small to inspect. High-volume goods hide their defects in their own abundance. The sharpener shavings pile up, and no one looks in the bin.