Reveal test ad
Thanks for clicking our ad. Reveal is running an advertising campaign to test the economics of ad tech (online advertising technology). Our goal is to discover:
- Can an advertiser prevent their ads from running on fake-news, clickbait, and hate sites — thus financially supporting those sites?
- What percentage is the “ad-tech tax,” that is, how much of what the advertiser pays to the ad-tech firm goes to the publisher who runs the ad?
- How many ad impressions (those an advertiser pays for) were seen by humans vs. those that were non-human bot hits?
Distil Networks has volunteered to help with the latter. They're skilled in discerning flesh and blood from fraud and bots, even when hidden in the voluminous data the advertiser gets in an ad-tech report.
Online advertising fraudsters use numerous ploys, including a seemingly endless army of bots, to steal massive amounts of money from advertisers, an estimated $16.4 billion in 2017 alone. That’s a lot of cash, so we’re digging into how this whole scheme works.
We created the ad you clicked to attract these bots, which pretend to be real live human beings (like yourself) as a way to charge advertisers for phony views. By running this ad, then analyzing the traffic to see how much of it was fraud-bots, we'll get insight into the scale and characteristics of the fraud.
“Only 15 percent of impressions ever have the possibility to be seen by a real person. Then, factor in that 54 percent of ads are not viewable and you’re left with only 8 percent of impressions that have the opportunity to be seen by a real person. Let me clarify: that does not mean that 8 percent of impressions are seen. That means only 8 percent have the chance to be seen. That’s an unbelievable amount of waste in an industry where metrics are a major selling point.” — Reid Tatoris, Distil Networks
When we finish this project, we'll tell what we found on our weekly radio show/podcast. Some of the data we've already collected to help us with this ad-tech test is:
- "Reveal's list of fake-news, clickbait, and hate sites"<
- "Who funds fake news?"
- "How fake news sites whack-a-molest the web"
Are you an advertiser or publisher? Do you work in ad tech? Have you had an experience with online ads you'd like to share? If so, please fill out this form: