This week's review of ad fraud and privacy in the digital advertising space.
Ad fraud spikes on web traffic by 94% when the ‘direct’ seller is unauthorized. This week, Pixalate released the Q3 2024 Programmatic Ad Seller Misrepresentation Report for Web. The report uses SCO data to examine unauthorized sellers in the open programmatic advertising supply chain across desktop and mobile web, mobile apps, and CTV.
Mobile app programmatic ads are the most susceptible. We also released the Q3 2024 Programmatic Ad Seller Misrepresentation Report for Mobile Apps, which found that 38% of mobile app traffic failed Pixalate’s SupplyChain Object verification (SCO) due to unauthorized sellers.
‘Direct’ ad seller misrepresentation hit Connected TV (CTV) hardest. In the Q3 2024 Programmatic Ad Seller Misrepresentation Report for CTV, we revealed that 28% of CTV traffic with SCOs marked as ‘complete’ was sold by unauthorized direct sellers.
Pixalate's Trust & Safety Advisory Board regularly publish manual reviews where they assess an app’s child-directedness:
You can search Pixalate's full catalogue of reviews in our CTV and Mobile App Review Page.
Challenging industry assumptions. The Q3 2024 Programmatic Ad Seller Misrepresentation Report for Web was quoted by MediaPost this week in an article titled "Programmatic Posturing: Many Ad Sellers Are Unauthorized." Here's what the article had to say:
"Of all ad traffic containing the SupplyChain Object (SCO), 11% failed Pixalate's SCO verification in Q3 because of unauthorized sellers.
Moreover, '5% of all desktop and mobile web open programmatic ad impressions are sold by unauthorized ‘direct’ sellers,' he study states,
And, 94% of invalid traffic (IVT), including ad fraud, involved an unauthorized direct seller.
What all this means is that the digital advertising ecosystem is vulnerable to unauthorized selling despite ads.txt, the tool meant to enable buyers to check whether sellers are authorized by the publisher."
Visit MediaPost here to read the full article.
