An emphatic blog post about fake ad traffic has been picked up by every major player in the media and ad:tech industry, and is promising to bring about real change.
The post author, John Battelle, first warned of corrosion within ad traffic from bots and spoofed visits in January 2013, which led to the formation of the Traffic of Good Intent task force (TOGI), an IAB-sanctioned working group.
TOGI has now published two white papers on the issue of ad traffic fraud. The first, Understanding Online Traffic Fraud, gives a broad overview of the problem and features the tag line “Failing to root out traffic fraud funds criminal activity and supports organized crime.” The second, Traffic Fraud: Best Practices for Reducing Risks to Exposure, is aimed at players in this ecosystem – brands, agencies, trading desks, technology providers, ad exchanges and publishers.
