Last month, Guardian US and programmatic partner MightyHive teamed up with Google to test how much ad inventory being sold on the open marketplace was not legit.
The team purchased ad inventory—ostensibly from Guardian US—through demand-side platform (DSP) buying via the open marketplace. A similar buy was made specifying verification from ads.txt, a program adopted by publishers to signal that their inventory is what it says it is.
What they found was clear evidence that unauthorized players were pretending to sell Guardian inventory and diverting the revenue to themselves. Of the video ad inventory purchased without validation, 72% was fraudulent.
The good news was that the buy using ads.txt verification seemed to have worked, with the Guardian seeing all the revenue from that campaign.
“There’s a lot of things that can be eliminated from a fraud or invalid traffic perspective if the buy side would simply require it,” according to Walter Knapp, CEO of supply-side platform (SSP) Sovrn. “It benefits publishers that deserve it when buyers only buy quality.”
Read the whole article here: Ad Fraud Still Plagues Digital Media’s Supply Chain
Source: eMarketer
Article length: 477 words
Article reading time: Less than 3 minutes
