Online ad fraud may be twice as bad as thought

It makes us wonder why advertisers would seem rather to risk billions to ad fraud than pay for audited, provable audience in print and digital magazines and other publications. 

An article in Business Insider says that online ad fraud may be twice as big as first thought and advertisers stand to lose $16.4 billion to it this year.

A study commissioned by WPP ad agencies estimates that fraudulent traffic and clicks manufactured by bots in 2017 may be more than double what the [U.S.] Association of National Advertisers estimated would be lost to ad fraud in 2016. 

The World Federation of Advertisers predicted that fraud will cost advertisers $50 billion by 2025. 

Across 200 billion daily bid requests,4 billion ad calls, and 10 billion ad impressions a month, over a period of 12 months, the study by ad verification company Adloox found

Across the 200 billion bid requests, 50% were detected as being either non-human traffic (either a bot or a hijacked device) or fraudulent traffic, which includes bad actors trying to spoof real web domains to attempt to pass off to ad buyers as premium publishers.