{"id":1394,"date":"2015-06-08T11:12:05","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T15:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.acaweb.ca\/en\/?p=1394"},"modified":"2020-10-27T16:42:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T20:42:00","slug":"why-viewability-is-second-to-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acaweb.ca\/en\/2015\/why-viewability-is-second-to-fraud\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Viewability Is Second To Fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Allen
Allen Dillon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There has been a lot of hoopla recently about viewability and how advertisers and their agencies are demanding 100% viewable inventory from publishers. This is an ongoing debate backed by a plethora of data and arguments for all sides, but it often overlooks fundamental security issues that bring all data points into question.<\/p>\n

For instance, we need to ensure we are measuring against real human activity first. We must, at the very least, answer the following question with 100% certainty: does the browser rendering the ads belong to a real human?<\/p>\n

As more advertising dollars shift towards digital media, so are cyber criminals. New releases of malicious software are emerging every day, with enhanced capabilities for defrauding advertisers. The criminals are well-funded and manage an underground economy that employs the best talent and technology available. Nobody in the system is immune, including premium providers. One has to consider real security measures, in the same context as the financial industry for example. Establishing security requires prioritizing the issues, in this order:<\/p>\n

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  1. Real human<\/li>\n
  2. Viewability<\/li>\n
  3. Right audience<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Let\u2019s not be na\u00efve \u2013 we have progressed beyond the era of fraudsters embedding and stacking ads in 1×1 pixels. The current threats lie in sophisticated botnets employing real browsers and accessing user-generated cookies while emulating human behaviour at advanced levels.<\/p>\n

    However, picturing a modernized version of the ad-stuffing fraud scheme helps put things in a better perspective. In this scheme, a publisher clutters visible (viewable) ads onto pages and then serves these pages directly to bots to view. This allows the rogue publisher to maximize its impression-profit per bot view. Since the pages are designed specifically for bots, and not humans, there is no requirement for content. Viewability simply doesn\u2019t matter while bots are the only viewer.<\/p>\n

    In a specific scheme we examined, a variant was acting more intelligently. We uncovered a publisher stuffing over 250 ads \u2013 distributed over multiple ad vendors \u2013 on a single page while driving bot traffic to it. The part that was surprising was not related to the number of ads on the page but that a well-orchestrated harmony of events were working in the background, shifting each ad into view to bypass viewability detection mechanisms. The criminal is getting smarter. This was unlike any threat we have detected and analysed to date.<\/p>\n

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