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In the last few days we’ve seen several announcements about a “new form” of ad fraud that is plaguing our industry. These announcements point to tactics like hiding ads within iFrames on pornographic sites and fraudulent impressions tied to copyright infringement sites.
There are two key issues with these announcements:
- There is a reason this activity occurs on porn or copyright infringing sites: these websites have a difficult time securing legitimate advertising revenue. But confusing Brand Safety and Fraud Detection is misleading. The two technologies are completely separate. Fraud can occur on any website on any topic, and does. Catching non-Brand Safe inventory is not sufficient for catching Fraud. Fraud is outright theft and the same techniques used to detect porn or copyright infringement don’t work here.
- The reality is, this is old news. Both porn and torrents type sites have large traffic volume, so the bad actors have made a practice of monetizing fraudulently served ads on these sites for a couple of years now. This can take many forms, but they all share the common attribute of fraud – they have no potential to be viewed by a human user.
Common forms of fraud include:
- Bot traffic – Nonhuman traffic designed to mimic users and inflate audience numbers.
- Pixel stuffing – Stuffing an ad into a 1×1 pixel at the bottom of a page.
- Ad stacking – Placing multiple ads on top of one other in a single ad placement.
We discovered and announced this onslaught of fraud in 2011 along with the Wall Street Journal and have been solving for it with our technology since then. Our proactive solution goes beyond the “band-aid” products that are currently being proposed, like industry black lists or log-level audit reports. Published fraud reports would simply notify bad actors that they have been caught, at which point they would register a new domain and continue their fraudulent activity. And log reports only tell you about problems after they’ve occurred. That’s why our solution tackles fraud from both a pre-bid and blocking front, ensuring 360-degree protection for brands leveraging our Suspicious Activity Detection in exchanges and direct ad placement buying decisions.
In fact, we just announced that our pre-bid programmatic fraud solution is now fully integrated and leveraged by many of our partners, including: AppNexus, Turn, Chango, Federated Media, Magnetic, Media6Degrees, Media IQ, Netmining, PulsePoint, SHEKNOWS, ValueClick, BrandScreen, Digilant, MediaMath, QUISMA, The Trade Desk.
For more information, visit: http://integralads.com/our-solutions/ad-exposure.