[jason_dstillery]

To all the people saying this isn't a problem: it really is. Even if advertisers bake a fraud premium into their buys, blindly letting money flow to bad actors creates an incentive to be a bad actor, and bad actors in this space do bad things that hurt everyone: waste massive amounts of bandwidth, spam the web and app ecosystems with worthless content, and worst of all exploit users to build and run botnets.

We've spent a lot of effort over the last few years fighting this stuff, and we're really happy to see the industry as a whole starting to agree that it's a problem. If you'd like to help make the web better by working to remove these incentives, we're hiring engineers; contact info in my profile.

[character0]

I agree with the above sentiment. To elaborate on who gets hurt, the problem is that small publishers get squeezed. If you're ESPN, you can create a private exchange, keep a strong agency sales force, and keep up your prices. However, the smaller publishers will not have the ability to reach the buyers except through these compromised exchanges. If the buyers flee the open markets, the smaller pubs have to band together into networks again or try their luck with programmatic direct (Pubmatic is making a push for this with their recent acquisitions). We go back to a world of media buying that looks more like TV; we become a lot less fluid.