White Ops has exposed the largest and most pro table ad fraud operation to strike digital advertising to date. Russian cybercriminals are siphoning millions of advertising dollars per day away from U.S. media companies and the biggest U.S. brand name advertisers in the single most pro table bot operation discovered to date.
Using an army of automated web browsers run from fraudulently acquired IP addresses, the Methbot operation is “watching” as many as 300 million video ads per day on falsified websites designed to look like premium publisher inventory. More than 6,000 premium domains were targeted and spoofed, enabling the operation to attract millions in real advertising dollars.
It’s becoming a serious problem. Consider the following from Type A Group’s newsletter:
1ne: Click rates on display ads remain so low, they are not even rounding error. Viewiership of display ads is almost as discouraging.
2wo: Facebook was found to be overstating some metrics by as much as 80%.
3hree: Proctor& Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, said it was discontinuing its “precision targeted” Facebook advertising after seeing sales drop 8% in a year.
4our: A study by the American Marketing Association showed that over 88% of marketing executives reported no tangible results from social media marketing.
5ive: 70% of media and marketing executives say they are dissatisfied with the state of online advertising.
Now let’s be real here. A lot of these poor metrics are because online advertisers don’t understand online media and how to develop ads. They think an image with some simple copy is enough, but the fact of the mater is that [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]out of every 100 impressions you’re only really getting 6.[/inlinetweet] according to the ad contrarian.
We also have to take into account that the Type A Group is anti anything to do with online ads or social media but his voice is not to be taken lightly. The fraud in online media is getting out of control and click thru rates are dismal because marketers just don’t understand the online space.
