Introduction As an ad-fraud researcher of a decade now (that’s crazy to type), I consider myself something of an expert when it comes to identifying the places where real humans are weaponized to create invalid ad impressions. Knowing where to look is half the battle, as anyone who runs a business built on crawler data … Continued
deepsee.io updates MFA criteria to better flag ad-heavy, low-quality sites, ensuring transparency and quality in programmatic advertising. Learn more about our new standards.
It’s been a little over a month since we released our new research portal, and the reception has been both encouraging, and educational! We’ve brought in clients across all our usage tiers, and they come from all parts of the supply chain. Through conversations with those clients, we’re constantly honing in on where the product … Continued
This investigation was a joint effort between Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence’s Jérôme Segura, DeepSee’s Rocky Moss and Antonio Torres. Key findings Introduction Online video streaming sites have always been some of the most visited destinations on the web. Legitimate ones will typically require a subscription fee or rely on advertising as part of their business model. … Continued
Introduction to Rewarded Traffic In this article we provide clarity into the practice of “rewarded traffic,” or traffic generated by users who are compensated with in-game currency in exchange for opening ad-monetized publisher pages in a webview during an ad break. There is no real industry documentation about this format for creating web traffic; it … Continued
Introduction In this post, we’ll examine if a Tranco List without Alexa Rank data would be suitable for marketers looking for a new source of site performance data. Would they find the switch over to be jarring? Would the sites they saw on Alexa Rank lists still be present? If so, what sort of consistency … Continued
Introduction In this post, we’ll be sharing what we know about a traffic sourcing campaign that affected multiple Yahoo properties between February 2021 (at minimum; possibly earlier) and February 2022. The sites affected were: yahoo.com & its subdomains, techcrunch.com, and autoblog.com. The traffic was sourced by multiple means, and it’s hard to quantify exactly how … Continued
Even pirates need a retirement plan
Ad arbitrage is the practice of buying web traffic, then selling ad space on your website for more than you paid to acquire the user. It’s not a new practice, not by any means, but we’ve detected a new strategy used to keep it profitable.
Using data gathered from ~150,000 web publishers with Prebid based header bidding wrappers, between January 1st – May 21st 2021, we hope to present to our readers some compelling data points that have not been presented before.