Thread · 4 tweets · 28 Jan 2020

The ad fraud world is full of wonders: “Ad Fraudsters Exploited Grindr In A Scheme Targeting Roku Apps“ It's good to see more mainstream coverage of ad fraud: it matters more than people outside this space often realise. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…

At first it seems like it's just smart people stealing from companies, and to many that's just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, perhaps even kind of cool. But the companies being stolen from are 1) publishers and 2) mostly consumer-facing ones. Not all good but overall more often on your side.

Other companies, however, profit from this: intermediaries. Adtech makes money from ad fraud. It's a clear sign of intermediary capture that fraud levels are as high as they are. They're incentivised to have it below a threshold, but not zero.

So ad fraud matters to a healthy digital ecosystem, and to all the good we get from having publishers alive and still able to maintain independence from intermediaries. It's worth paying attention to!