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ad fraud

What Is Ads.cert?

With adoption of ads.txt ramping up among publishers, this is as good a time as any to look toward whatever is next in the battle against ad fraud. The good news (that is, it’s good unless you were hoping for a bit of a breather) is that the IAB Tech…

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TAG Certified Channels: The Next Stage of Certification

(AdBeeler is a monthly column from AdMonsters' Chair and PubForum legend Rob Beeler.) Get ready to add a new phrase to your ad tech lexicon: TAG Certified Channel. Remember the beginning of 2017? If a full flashback on the events of this year is too painful, I’ll remind you that…

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The Buy Side Gotta Check Itself

Last week a lot of my industry connections passed around the Buzzfeed story, “Attack of the Zombie Websites,” about a programmatic, bot-driven web of lies that may have shorted advertisers tens of millions of dollars. Although it was meticulously reported, I had a hard time reading the full article not…

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Through a Scanner Frequently: When Malvertisers Evade the Scanners

Earlier in 2017, savvy publishers and platforms started noticing a gnarly new breed of mobile redirects, one that’s particularly evasive to common-practice malware prevention methods. It’s a new page in the standard playbook malvertisers long ago developed to skirt around the watchdogs in the ad ecosystem, one that allows them…

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The End of Arbitrage? A Look at Ads.txt

Today (May 17), the IAB Tech Lab rolled out a new method for combating ad fraud, specifically of the domain-spoofing variety. It’s called Ads.txt, which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers, or at least it is if you really need to turn the word “ads” into an acronym in this industry.On…

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Stop Buying Video on the Open Exchange: Part II

Read Part I of this two-parter here.If you recall from Part I of this series, we'd been talking about how arbitraged video impressions are bad. There are a number of reasons why arbitraged video impressions suck from the buy-side perspective:1. Most obviously, they make the same ads cost more than…

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Stop Buying Video on the Open Exchange: Part I

If you’re a marketer looking to send the right ad to the right person in the right place, programmatically buying online video ads on the open exchange is a monumentally stupid move. If you’re a brand trying to advertise that way, you’re wasting much, if not most, of your ad…

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Phones on Fire: Who Gets Burned by Mobile Ad Fraud?

A new report from fraud detection company Forensiq sounds the alarm on widespread and ostensibly new forms of mobile ad fraud. But a closer look at how advertisers are getting bilked shows that first responders here need to be not brands, but publishers and other app providers.Forensiq’s report does detail…

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