[nobody_nowhere]

When he says "unsuspecting advertisers", I don't think he means it in the sense of "unaware", as this problem has been broadly covered in the trade press over the past year. It's more that they have trouble doing anything about it.

The problem is that cleansing the display ad supply chain is complex, and some suppliers (notably "supply side platforms", or SSPs) are complicit in the fraud, knowingly signing up and profiting from publishers who pay for this fraudulent traffic. The article cited as footnote #1 gives some detail there.

Buyers have limited options to combat the problem. Spider.io does absolutely oustanding work, but they're a small company and can't deliver at scale. Larger, more widely adopted suppliers have solutions that (arguably) aren't work paying for.

Because display is a tonnage game and ad rates are so cheap (well under $1/thousand impressions wholesale), you can just bake the cost of fraud (and viewability, and other issues) into the cost of your buying. Assuming you can reliably measure your ad ROI, which only a fraction of advertisers can do.

[schenecstasy]

Outstanding comment. Spider.io is solving a problem that doesn't exist. In the purest white hat view of the world combating ad fraud is richly complex technical challenge and a huge untapped vein of potential revenue. Unfortunately it's the former and not the latter. Ad fraud is a mild foot fungus on the world of online display and no actors are incentivized to fight it.

[jmngomes]

When you're selling an advertising medium, virtually all advertisers will ask how can they "measure ROI". What really seems to me is that most of this is just talk. (http://kariobrien.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/marketing_roi_...)

I'd argue that fraud is a big problem because it affects ROI.

Especially, it affects 40% of mobile ads, which means that you just wasted 40% of your campaign's budget.

It's estimated to be between 2% and 19% on online ads, with those 2% being acknowledged by Google, who is probably one of the few providers that actually does something to prevent it.

I think this is a challenging topic. There's an economical problem in plain view. Why are advertisers ignoring it? Lack of alternatives?