Videology is a video advertising platform that offers video ad spots to a variety of networks and sites around the world. The company began working with White Ops in May of 2015 to incorporate digital fraud detection into their ad inventory.
They are not walking about the results of this fraud detection.
They say since it was implemented a little over a year ago, they have blocked more than 28 billion fraudulent requests for ads that were coming from bots. These blocked ads would have been worth $553 million to the fraudsters had they been served up.
Video ads are frequently hit the hardest by bots and other fraudulent activities, so it is very important for companies like Videology to take proactive steps to identify and block fraudulent traffic. The founder and CEO of White Ops, Michael Tiffany, estimated that video advertising is typically going to be between 20 and 30% fraudulent if there are no advanced blocking techniques in place.
Tiffany also said, “From the advertiser prospective, it looks like you are buying the ads that are shown to real people – the bot traffic looks like ordinary traffic to most levels of analysis. And new computers are getting infected to play this ad fraud game all the time.”
White Ops has done a good job at determine what types of actions are authentically human, and which ones are being done by a bot. by looking at a variety of factors during the time a video ad plays, they are able to quickly determine which are bots and which are not. Using this information, they can then block future ads from being served up to a bot down the road.
Of course, their system is constantly being updated to keep up with the fraudsters activity, which is also always changing. It is an ongoing battle that may never be fully won. Eliminating the vast majority of ad fraud, however, is the goal at the moment and White Ops seems to be leading the way in achieving that end.
