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- New York ad-tech firm AppNexus says it has a new plan to stamp out fake web traffic that is used by scammers to rip off advertisers.
- AppNexus has inked a deal with the anti-ad-fraud company White Ops to scan every potential ad that goes through its system – and prevent any fraudulent transactions.
- "We think we can make this go away entirely," said CEO Brian O'Kelley.
Digital advertising continues to be plagued by hackers ripping off marketers. The ad-tech giant AppNexus says it has found a way to wipe this plague out.
Specifically the New York-based firm has inked a deal with the anti-fraud company White Ops. The partnership will see White Ops technology baked into AppNexus' ad buying and ad selling software.
The net result, according to AppNexus CEO Brian O'Kelley, is that AppNexus and White Ops will scan every single ad that may be bought or sold to determine if the traffic being delivered is indeed coming from a human, and not a bot.
If White Ops says the traffic isn't human, AppNexus won't let the transaction happen, O'Kelley said. This will all happen in milliseconds.
If it works, O'Kelley believes this will significantly choke off bogus traffic from AppNexus and its customers – and he thinks this will pressure other ad exchanges (like say Google's) to follow suit.
"We think we can make this go away entirely," he told Business Insider.
That would be no small feat. Figures vary, but experts say that various forms of ad fraud cost the industry billions in wasted revenue; White Ops has estimated that the industry lost between $6 and $7 billion annually in recent years.
As programmatic advertising has exploded over the last decade, the digital ad business' embrace of automation has left it vulnerable to scam artists. And there are multiple flavors of fraud, such as scammers falsely listing their small websites on ad exchanges as well as on known sites (like say CNN.com or NYTimes.com).
Other fraudsters install malware on people's computers and even insert ads on top of existing web ads, cashing in along the way.
One popular ad fraud scam involves creating bogus web sites, sending loads of non-human traffic to them using bots, and then selling all sorts of ads on these fake sites.
O'Kelley said that its White Ops deal won't eliminate all fraud, but he thinks it can wipe out the non-human traffic part. He says the industry needs to join forces on this quest if it wants to get any real headway.
A few years ago, AppNexus found itself with a significant fraud problem of its own. Since then, "we've been spending a ton of money every year to fight this," he said. "It’s a big tax on the industry."
Different ad-tech companies work with different anti-fraud vendors, and ad buyers often chose to work with yet another partner.
"Not every company stands by the same standards," O'Kelley said. In the case of White Ops, "they only focus on non-human traffic, and they do it better than anybody else."
To date, White Ops has raised over $30 million to build tech designed to sniff out bot traffic. In 2016 the company claimed to have discovered a bot net that was stealing $5 million a day.
"We could use our partnership as a competitive advantage, but it's too important," O'Kelley said.
"But we've got tens of billions of dollars coming online. So we said, 'let's raise the bar so high for everybody.' This is a way to put fraud away for good."
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See Also:
- LinkedIn wants to be more than where you look for jobs – so it's taking a big page from Facebook’s playbook
- 'When we do something that grows, it makes sense to pay attention to it:' Publishers are seeing huge traffic spikes from Flipboard
- The CEO of Publicis told us how he stared down a furious internal rebellion to bet the future of his $11 billion company on artificial intelligence
