Protected Media

What ??!?! Do you really think so? We see a lot of viruses that are being hosted on legitimate users and running in the background without their knowledge (and of course browsing a lot of ads...)  all these ads are coming from valid IDFAs and valid users ... it is good traffic? Probably not! - Zac

Some Adtech vendors are developing in-house solutions for handling ad-fraud. Usually they are recruiting several data-mining experts and try to solve ad fraud using data analysis. This is a great way to solve the non-sophisticated fraudsters / fraudulent traffic. However, more sophisticated fraudsters know how to create the exact behavior - CTR/CPV/CPI etc. that advertisers are expecting, making it harder to detect fraud with data analysis. Fraudsters randomize all possible variables such as browsers, operating systems, websites and more. We heard about fraudster groups that even record keyboards and mouse movements and then 'play' them randomly. These kind of methods break data-mining models. In one case, we analyzed data for a customer that had $100k fraud chargeback on the day we first met him. All of his parameters: CPM/CPC/CPI and even User LTV (life time value) seems "by the book" but all of it was pure fraud... -Z

Recent numbers on the effect of Methbot that AppNexus published on their blog are pretty aligned with what we see. To view the post, follow this link:  http://blog.appnexus.com/2016/methbot-denied/  ... In fact, we caught this bot on our end long time ago  ... Recently, we also saw its permutation to a new version of the same bot ;)  But yes, the scale is not as high... -Zac

No, blocking Amazon AWS as a hosting provider is dangerous... From time to time you will find legitimate organizations that route all their traffic via Amazon AWS for security reasons (blocking adult/malware URLs and viruses). The result of blocking Amazon is blocking your best/converting users -Zac

The  New York Times  just reported that a Russian cyber-forgery ring has created more than 500,000 fake Internet users and 250,000 fake websites to trick advertisers and pocket $5 million a day - for ads and videos that are never watched. At Protected Media, our platform has identified this bot network a long time ago and  keeps monitoring it as it evolves into new variants . We are happy to say that all of our customers were fully protected and did not lose a dime. Bye bye bots! - Zac