A week ago I stumbled upon this great post by Rob Leathern about mobile video fraud. From that I got a few emails, including a pointer at just how blatant some of the fraud is. One of the examples was so good I just can't help not writing about it.

Let me start with the punchline. One fraudulent ad-unit shows so many ads that in 25-minutes I tracked:

5359 HTTP calls . Yes, five thousand three hundred and fifty nine individual HTTP calls.

. Yes, individual HTTP calls. 70.19 MB of traffic. SEVENTY MEGABYTES. Thankfully I loaded this on my laptop as this one single ad unit would have used 7% of my monthly cell phone data allowance!

The strategy is so simple it's scary. How they possibly get away with it is beyond me. Read on for details...

The call chain

A MediaMath exchange tag: http://vast.mathtag.com/?excha... PLY's Media player: http://affilaiteply.blob.core.windows.net/widgets/vid.. A load of crap from PLY's Adserver: http://vid.adrbl.com/play.html Tons and tons of ads from Facebook and AOL (via Liverail and Adaptv)

So what's happening here?

The first is an ad tag that looks like it's MediaMath buying an exchange impression The second is a video player provided by PLY. Click on it if you like -- what you get is an endless auto-playing auto-repeating stream of ads. The third... is the content the video player is asked to load. And that's where the magic begins.

I've taken the liberty to include the code here and highlight the relevant parts in a gentle red. For those non-technical don't worry, this isn't one of those technical posts...

I'll give you a minute. Can you see what's going on? Notice the page URLs that are being passed into Liverail (Facebook) and Adaptv (AOL): weather.com, wayfair.com, usmagazine.com, sbnation.com ... this is one ad-unit bought on an exchange on one website and it's being repackaged many times over into a variety of premium domains.

The $ Trail

PLY is buying broad inventory, repackaging it and stuffing as many video ad impressions possible repackaged as "premium" inventory. They effectively turn one remnant cheap impression into 1-15+ premium ones, depending on how long their unit is visible on the page.

Advertisers are paying real money for this inventory and being fooled into thinking that their ads are being shown on real sites.

This is the shit that makes people distrust ads. This player slows down the page, hogs up bandwidth and provides a generally awful user experience. It's a prime example of what causes the rise of ad-blockers... no wonder people keep telling me "pages load so much faster with Adblock enabled!". If the industry wants consumers to trust ads, we have to be better at policing the ads that take advantage of users.

Final Thoughts -- VAST/Video Dynamics



I'm not too familiar with the video market in general and so I have two questions that I hope folks can answer in the comments.

First -- I'm wondering whether there is a more complex business relationship going on than what is evident from the HTTP calls. Does anyone know what the money trail looks like here?

Second -- I'm not familiar with VAST and VPAID. Can someone explain why they get away with such a simple scam? Is it because it's all XML calls and clients cannot run their own javascript to detect fraud? Why does this easy impression-spamming work still work in video?

Thanks for reading! Back to hibernation... until next time!

Appendix

Below are my saved copies of all the links above in case those stop working.