Falling off TRAQ

I help my wife with an ongoing, full-time project called The Devil’s Panties, a PG-13 comic about her adventures in life. Advertising is one of the things I have to monitor and continually tweak to make sure we can keep the lights on. All told, advertising accounts for about 1/3rd of our income.

Leading up to the 2013 holiday season I noticed a sudden drop in ad revenue. Almost overnight, our ad fill rates went from about 60% to about 10%. This was VERY bad news.

Very, VERY bad news.

The holidays are the best time for ad revenue, and that income helps my wife and I get through the dry months. I had to get to the bottom of this. While investigating, I picked up on a little tidbit that would lead me down a rabbit hole.

I discovered something called a “TRAQ Score”. The TRAQ score is a product by Integral Ad Science (formerly known as AdSafe Media). It’s a combination of several metrics that tells potential advertisers how “fit” your site is for their brand. Think of it as sort of like a credit score for your website. At some unknown interval, advertisers check this score to determine which ads are ok to serve on your site, or if it’s ok to serve ads at all. As near as I could decipher them, the metrics are:

ADT: Adult Content

ALC: Alcohol

DLM: Downloadable Material

DRG: Drugs

HAT: Hate Speech

OFF: Offensive Language

SAM: ???

These individual scores range from 1-1000, the higher the “safer”. What happened to us was that our ADT(Adult) content score dropped from 1000 to 450. For comparison, 450 is the same ADT score that xhamster.com has, which is a porn streaming website.

I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly changed on our site, so I tried to “clean” it up as much as I could. After self-censoring the site I waited, and waited, and still nothing. Our adult content score was still 450, and ad revenue was still crap.

I reached out to our ad provider and they offered to “whitelist” our domain, which I took to mean that they wouldn’t query our TRAQ score before deciding what ads are worthy of showing.

The holiday season was in full swing. Before they white listed us, we were getting about 0.30-0.45 CPM, with up to a 28% fill rate.

The day after they white listed us, we got up to $1.00 CPM with up to a 50% fill rate.

Our Holiday Journey

This was great news, and my wife and I both breathed a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately that relief wouldn’t last long.

Off the Cliff, Again.

Our ad revenue dipped again after the holiday season, much harder than the usual post-holiday drop. I reached out to our ad provider again, and it looked like whatever special arrangement was made to whitelist us was now over. They mentioned that the adult content score was too low, and that there wasn’t anything they could do. They reached out to Integral Ads(the creators of TRAQ) on our behalf, but it was entirely out of their hands.