Publishing is hard enough without things like malware and auto-redirects. It’s complete BS that publishers even have to deal with these types of ads.
Publishers and readers are exposed to these ads through nefarious buyers who try to game the system. Such buyers intentionally slip hard-to-detect malware and redirects into ads on the open exchange.
Malware is a serious problem, with the goal of infecting computers and creating botnets, which can then be used to generate ad fraud.
Redirects don’t feel as dangerous, however they do cause a fair amount of annoyance. They send users to sites and app stores without consent, all in the name of increasing their user base.
What is the solution?
The prominent industry tools available today rely on retroactive, sample-based, third-party scanning to identify ads or seats that distribute malicious ads. This has not been enough to solve the problem. There’s just too much room for error, since ad quality is an ever-moving target.
Taking things further, Sovrn employs a team of people (real actual humans) dedicated to ad quality. We empower this team with detection tools to scan every single ad for malware and redirects every second of every day. Even when our team is sleeping, our tech is constantly and consistently protecting your readers. Before the malicious ad can get to a publisher’s site, we identify it and stop it from getting served.
Since we’ve turned our proactive bad ad scanner on, we’ve seen incredible results. We are now able to identify which Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and seats on whose behalf we are forced to drop bad ads. We can then call them out on it. We protect publishers and their readers from 83,000 malicious ads, representing 0.5% of bids, we see every minute.
Ads containing malware dropped to almost zero after new scanning tools implemented.
Sovrn is not sitting on the sidelines. We are fighting right alongside you to ensure a clean ad experience for your readers. We continue to invest in people and technology to increase ad quality and bring more options for more control to you in the coming weeks and months.
