Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Whoa: "Domain Spoofing Costs Business Insider 10M Fake Impressions -- in 15 Minutes - AdvertisingAge"

This is some serious scamma-jamma.

From AdAge:
During a test that lasted just 15 minutes, Business Insider flagged some 10 million to 30 million phony impressions on various exchanges. Essentially, millions of ads purporting to be for Business Insider were sold by bad actors passing as the publication.

The findings left Jana Meron, VP of programmatic and data strategy at Business Insider, livid.

"I was pissed," she tells Ad Age. "The reality is there is a great injustice that is being done and the more we can talk about transparency and openness then the better it is for the industry."

Meron is a no-nonsense ad exec known for saying what's on her mind. She's also widely regarded by her peers as the biggest advocate for ads.txt, an industry-wide effort that aims to stamp out domain spoofing by labeling a publisher's inventory as "authentic."

It will officially roll out for the first time this Tuesday.

In one example of detected fraud, a Business Insider advertiser thought they had purchased $40,000 worth of ad inventory through the open exchanges when in reality, the publication only saw $97, indicating the rest of the money went to fraud....MORE