Pixalate’s research reveals that Apple TV apps were the most at risk of CTV app spoofing, with an app spoofing rate of 13%, as measured by Pixalate, followed by Amazon Fire TV apps (9%), Roku apps (6%), and Samsung Smart TV apps (4%)
LONDON, May 16, 2024 -- Pixalate, the market-leading fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform for Connected TV (CTV) and Mobile Advertising, today released the April 2024 Connected TV (CTV) App Spoofing Reports for Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Apple TV.
The reports reveal which CTV apps are most at risk of app spoofing. Malicious actors can use invalid traffic (IVT) techniques, such as app spoofing, to disguise the CTV app traffic source. In this scheme, an app, like a ‘fireplace screensaver,’ might be misrepresented as a popular app, such as “ESPN,” to attract advertisers. (See Pixalate’s ‘Monarch’ CTV ad fraud scheme discovery for an example.)
Pixalate’s data science team analyzed over 2.8 billion global open programmatic advertising impressions across over 6k CTV apps (including delisted) across the Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Apple TV app stores in April 2024 to compile this research.
Download to see more apps - the top 15 per platform - at risk of spoofing in April 2024, as measured by Pixalate:
Pixalate’s App Spoofing reports for other platforms:
Methodology
To compile this research, Pixalate’s data science team took the following steps:
About Pixalate
Pixalate is a global platform for privacy compliance, ad fraud prevention, and data intelligence in the digital ad supply chain. Founded in 2012, Pixalate’s platform is trusted by regulators, data researchers, advertisers, publishers, ad tech platforms, and financial analysts across the Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, and website ecosystems. Pixalate is MRC-accredited for the detection and filtration of Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT). www.pixalate.com
Disclaimer
The content of this post, and the App Spoofing Report (the “Report”), reflect Pixalate’s opinions with respect to the factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the digital media industry. Pixalate’s opinions are just that, opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees; and neither this press release nor the Report are intended to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but instead, to report findings and apparent trends in the time period studied. Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”
