2015 Was a Lost Year in the Fight Against Online Ad Fraud
The level of ad fraud was essentially unchanged from the year before, though advertisers could lose $7.2 billion in 2016.
This article is for subscribers only.
The advertising industry was on pace to lose $6.3 billion last year by showing digital ads to robots, according to a December 2014 study by White Ops, a fraud detection firm. The study applied some concrete numbers to illustrate a problem that most people in the industry understood was pervasive. It was partly undertaken in the hope that the sheer scale of the issue would shock advertising agencies out of complacency.
Nope. On Tuesday, White Ops published a follow-up study showing that the percentage of traffic lost to fraud hasn’t changed at all. Given that spending on digital ads is set to grow about 15 percent this year, the firm predicted that advertisers will lose $7.2 billion to bot fraud this year.