Dive Brief:
- An embattled Yahoo is facing allegations that its video ad business is largely fraudulent, according to sources cited in a recent CNBC report.
- Yahoo’s ad business earned it $1.15 billion in Q2 2015, but one company reported its programmatic video platform misrepresented up to 70% of served ads charging the company a higher pre-roll CPM rate for ads that actually appeared in banner ads.
- In August, Yahoo subjected its users to malware-infected ads for a week due a Flash issue that was uncovered by a third party, Malwarebytes.
Dive Insight:
"We’ve spent over the course of two to three years planning very sophisticated partnerships and work around the issues of fraud. From our perspective, any number close to the numbers thrown out in that article are completely inaccurate," Tod Sacerdoti, VP of display and video ad products and the founder of Yahoo’s video ad exchange BrightRoll, told Ad Exchanger.
The numbers Sacerdoti referred to include 39% to 70% of ads running through BrightRoll were claimed to run as pre-roll video ads at a $20 CPM while actually running in banner ads that charge about a tenth of that CPM, and that BrightRoll traffic was largely from data center IP addresses which could indicate those views were non-human and fraudulent.
Yahoo has been under fire recently for everything from running malware in banner ads due to a Flash vulnerability to its board voting to sell off the flagship Internet business. The latest issue is a CNBC report where multiple sources called out Yahoo’s video advertising business as fraudulent on multiple fronts including nonhuman ad views, and its programmatic platform misrepresenting where the ads are displayed.
Ad fraud is an ongoing concern for all players in digital advertising and in combating the issue. Steve Sullivan, vp of partner success at Index Exchange, told Marketing Dive that transparency is the key along with following the money trail behind online ads.
"A fully transparent, traceable supply chain that allows identification of all parties to a transaction is the only way to substantially reduce fraud," Sullivan said.
