The more people who have a chance to buy your inventory, the more revenue opportunities you have — at least that is what publishers are often told. In reality, the opposite is true. This is due to a phenomenon known as Bidflation.

Programmatic ad fraud gets so much attention that it’s easy to forget there is still a large amount of regular fraud that occurs in advertising. This fraud isn’t tied to the programmatic auctions, and happens because of the black box that is ad tech. When I released a white paper on Weasel, we showed how the company Mobideck was ads.txt compliant and their app was approved for monetization on numerous SSPs and ad networks, even though the app in question (wease.im) was not fully functioning and…

I have spent much of my career catching individuals and companies who have reaped billions from advertisers (SynthNet, Weasel, etc..). Despite all the technologies out there, the money lost to fraud hasn’t decreased. There are many publishers, SSPs, DSPs, ad networks, and ad exchanges that have, at best, ignored fraud, and at worst, actively participated or orchestrated it. Many publishers are aware of the issues with fraud, but may not have the tools they need to effectively combat it. To…

We aren’t talking about an SEO rating although that is factored in. What we are talking about is a fraud score. This score is given to every domain or app by a handful of service providers and has a huge impact on the amount of money you can make from advertising.