Video: Twitter follows Google and Facebook by banning cryptocurrency ads
Fake media sites using techniques such as buying fake traffic to appear real and pretending to be legitimate media websites such as Hearst's Esquire.com[1] are running off with billions of dollars in revenues.
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"Ad fraud is at all time highs both in rate and in dollars," says Augustine Fou, an independent ad fraud researcher. "And what's worse is fraud detection is not catching it so people have a false sense of security."
Fou was the former chief digital officer[3] at Omnicom's Healthcare Consultancy Group, a $100 million agency. He just released State of Digital Ad Fraud Q2[4]. The report he shows two examples of "insane profits from ad fraud."
The examples show how arbitrage allows fraudsters buy cheap traffic and sell it at a premium -- achieving gains of 25 times and 45 times return on investments.
Buying $183,000 of traffic can result in a $4.6 million payout. And that is just one campaign and one technique. The potential payout for the year is in the billions of dollars.
Fou notes that the Financial Times discovered ad fraud of as much as $1 million a month going to fake FT.com sites but managed to stop it by persuading 24 advertising exchanges to drop the fraudsters.
Fake pageviews dominate
The extent of the problem is huge. Fraudsters are able to generate a larger inventory of pageviews[5] than all the legitimate publishers combined.
Read also: Yet again, Google tricked into serving scam Amazon ads[6]
Fou says that much of