Fraudlogix Blog

The ad tech trends rounding out 2019

With all the progress of advanced digital advertising, it’s easy to lose sight of big-picture trends and insights. From enterprise consolidations that impact ad operations to recent advances in supply chain transparency, the advertising solutions of our modern digital age are vast and ever changing. But how are these changes affecting the digital ecosystem? And what can advertisers expect in ad tech for the year to come? Here are the top ad tech trends rounding out 2019. (Marketing Land)

Snaptube app caught serving up invisible ads and charging users for premium purchases they didn't make

TSnaptube, a popular video downloader app for Android that has over 40 million users, has been caught generating fake ad clicks and unauthorized premium purchases from its users. According to security firm Upstream, users are served invisible ads without their knowledge that run silently on the device. The app also uses the same background click technique to rack up charges for premium purchases the user never requested. (TechCrunch)

Taboola and Outbrain merge in $850 million deal

Taboola and Outbrain, rivals that both operate advertising-based content recommendation engines for publishers that typically appear in the form of boxes at the bottom of online articles, are forming a single company. The merger will result in a customer list that will now number 20,000 online properties and an audience of 2.6 billion to compete better against the likes of Facebook and Google. (TechCrunch)

Ad blocker extensions caught in cookie-stuffing ad fraud scheme

Google has removed two extensions from the Chrome Web Store. The two extensions were fully functional ad blockers, but they tried to deceive users by using the names of other more reputable ad blocker extensions. But besides using misleading names to hijack and deceive other extensions' user bases, the two -- "AdBlock" by "AdBlock, Inc" and "uBlock" by "Charlie Lee" -- were also caught performing cookie stuffing - a form of affiliate ad fraud. (ZDNet)

What's in and out at Dmexco, 2019

As one of the ad tech industry's largest shows wrapped up this week in Cologne, Digiday outlined what's in and out on the conference show floor. (Digiday)

Q2 2019 Ad Fraud Report - 12% of ad traffic is fraudulent

Fraudlogix released its Q2 2019 Ad Fraud Report, finding that about 12 percent of programmatic ad traffic was fraudulent during the second quarter of this year. A series of insights can be found on the Fraudlogix Blog. (Fraudlogix)

The Latin American region had the highest percentage of fraudulent traffic globally in Q2 2019 with 13.5% of its ad traffic determined to be invalid. Globally, the fraud percent was 12%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues with the dubious distinction of having the riskiest traffic for advertisers in Q2 2019 with 26% of it fraudulent. Meanwhile, Google's Chrome continues to dominate the market with 65% of all ad traffic originating from the browser, and 14% of that traffic was fake.

Vidstart, a monetization platform, has entered into a partnership with Fraudlogix in order to implement further anti-fraud measures that will ensure high-quality traffic and prevent ad fraud schemes.

The latest data collected during Q2 2019 reveals that Google's Android OS was the most popular family of operating systems, however, almost 15 percent of ad traffic coming from those devices was fraudulent. Apple's iPhones fared better with only about 5 percent of ad traffic found to be fraudulent. Ad traffic from desktop devices running  Microsoft's Windows OS was 14 percent fraudulent while only about 6 percent of traffic coming from Apple's Mac OS was fake.