The scales have tipped, and programmatic has become more of a liability than an asset. Last year, Bloomberg News made headlines when it announced it was pulling the plug on open programmatic, citing bad ads and the impact they had on the reader’s experience. We surveyed 250 consumers about the…
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We’ve all heard the stories about ad placements that make brand managers cringe: ads for respectable brands appearing in terrorist recruitment videos, and the like. Obviously, marketers want to avoid such placements. But that’s just a start. In an ideal world, your ad will be seen by real people alongside…
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The burden of cost for preemptively identifying and blocking bad ads lies solely at the feet of the publisher. And because this approach often means that blocked ads don’t get filled at all, revenue cannot be recovered. Malvertisers, on the other hand, don’t stand to lose a thing – their…
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Publishers add more ads per page and lower their floors to capture more revenue, hoping to ride things out until higher CPMs return. Unfortunately, more ads, lower floors, and other desperate moves lead to more opportunities for bad actors to step in. And users will adopt blockers to maintain a…
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It’s a well-known fact that publishers lose over $1 billion per year from just malvertising alone. That number doesn’t even account for the total sum of dollars lost to other ad quality issues like redirects, non-compliant ads, data leaks and the like. In 2019, ad quality issues were awfully problematic…
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Our new Senior Editor Lynne d Johnson dives into the "Principles for a Better Programmatic Marketplace," an open letter to the industry from six exchanges that seems to grant programmatic buyers all their transparency wishes—fee transparency, no hidden auction machinations, traffic filtered for IVT... We're surprised they didn't throw a…
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You know what unfortunately is already too easy? Delivering malware to publishers via the open programmatic marketplace. The latest high-profile case involves a fake company called "Amobi" (not to be confused with the legit Amobee) dropping malicious code through a wonky Claritin ad. As tempting as it is to roll…
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It's not your imagination—most malvertising attacks do happen over weekends. Bad actors hope to catch ops when its guard is down, so the gatekeepers must always be vigilant. A robust ad-quality solution is an essential tool for a publisher, but finding the right one requires a great deal of due…
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As far as malvertising is concerned, redirects remain a particular scourge for ad ops teams. On mobile in particular, a redirect can wreck a user’s session at the least. It’s worse if the user is wise enough to avoid downloading whatever the redirect tells them to download. These attacks are…
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Discovery's $40 Million Investment in Thrillist's Parent Company This week it was announced Discovery Communications would be investing $40 million in Group Nine Media, the company that owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker. That’s less major than their $100 million investment in Group Nine last year, but still very…
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