This week's review of ad fraud and quality in the digital advertising space.
MediaPost has reported, citing Pixalate research, that "3.8% of the top 5,000 Alexa-ranked domains have adopted" the IAB's ads.txt initiative. "[Ads.txt] requires compliance and scaled adoption for it to be meaningful," wrote MediaPost. "Several months into the program, that doesn’t appear to be happening." Download the full list of publishers that have adopted ads.txt here.
CNBC.com wrote that chief marketers have "significant fear about ad fraud," citing a recent study from CMO Council. "A report by the CMO Council published Tuesday reveals that ad fraud and ad misplacement are two primary concerns for senior marketers when it comes to protecting their brands in digital media," wrote CNBC.com.
Per Digiday, the Financial Times examined the level of domain spoofing occuring against its site (ft.com). The Financial Times "found display ads against inventory masquerading as FT.com on 10 separate ad exchanges and video ads on 15 exchanges, even though the FT doesn’t even sell video ads programmatically, with 300 accounts selling inventory purporting to be the FT’s," wrote Digiday. "The FT has estimated the value of the fraudulent inventory to be £1 million ($1.3 million) a month."
"One of the most concerning [challenges] for publishers and marketers alike: 'domain spoofing,' in which bad actors pretend that the digital ad space they are selling is on websites that it isn’t," wrote the Wall Street Journal. "In terms of who’s to blame for spoofing, marketers and publishers typically point their fingers at the ad tech middlemen, or ad exchanges, which help facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers." To see which ad exchanges rank best against domain spoofing, check out Pixalate's Seller Trust Indexes.
Sign up for our blog to stay updated with new stats, trends, and analysis on digital ad fraud.
