Ad Fraud has cost advertisers $7.2bn in 2016!
Advertising fraud is typically done by creating fake ad traffic using content-scraping websites or other environments, launching ads outside of a user’s view, or creating other fictitious mechanisms for delivering ads that are not seen by consumers.
Some shocking facts:
- The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates ad fraud, maladvertising and ad blocking cost the U.S. marketing and media industries $5.8 billion in 2015.
- The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) estimates that within the next decade, fake internet traffic schemes will rank 2nd only to drug trafficking as organized crime’s largest revenue source.
Malicious Fraud can be in the form of :
- Bots or Botnets Bots are small programs usually hosted in unsuspecting users computers that can perform various activities on the internet.
- Ghost Sites The most widely reported type of fraud. These are real websites with real content, usually falsely produced or stolen from other legitimate websites. The sites’ only purpose is to defraud advertisers.
- Ad Stacking Ad stacking is a practice where multiple ads are stacked on top of one another, with only the top ad visible to the viewer.
- Purchased Traffic Digital advertising fraud isn’t only caused by ghost sites. Bot traffic exists on even the best websites. They can sometimes get taken advantage of by someone promising legitimate web traffic but is really just producing bot traffic.
- Mobile Advertisers using in-app placements: So-called “incentivized media” may perform well, but often only because people are viewing ads to gain an app-related reward, and not because they’re interested in the content.
- iFrame/1×1 Pixels iFrame stuffing, also referred to as pixel stuffing, takes place when a 1×1 pixel (invisible to the human eye) is placed on a site, sometimes through an ad unit. Unbeknownst to the user, these pixels can end up loading an entirely different website.
- Sub-standard placements: Video A large number of sites feature ‘autoplay’ videos, which do not require a viewer to actually click on the video for it to play.
