According to a study on behalf of the Association of National Advertisers, a staggering $6.3 billion dollars will be lost in 2015 due to fraudulent ‘bot traffic.’
Advertisers will incur the majority of this cost thanks to an army of bots that visits real web sites, run by real companies.
These bots inflate the monetized audiences at those web sites between 5% to 50%. One quarter of bots were targeting web sites that rank at the top 1,000 of Alexa.
Addressing this issue, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an advertising industry initiative to improve the digital ecosystem, today announced plans to create, maintain and share the TAG Fraud Threat List, a database of domains that have been identified as known sources of fraudulent bot traffic for digital ads.
“Information is power, and this program allows advertising companies to identify the domains that are driving fraudulent traffic and take power back from the criminals who are undermining our industry,” said TAG interim CEO Mike Zaneis.
“By gathering and sharing known sources of fraudulent impressions across the digital advertising ecosystem, TAG will give companies the information they need to find and remove non-human traffic from their inventory.”
The ad industry clearly fights back. For more information on the new initiative to combat fraud in advertising traffic, click here.
Fraudulent.com is for sale on Flippa 🙂
But this will cut into Google’s bottom line! 🙁
Could the bots be from the companies that sell the ad space???? Some of the richest companies in the World making most of their money from fraudulent ad clicks and they don’t seem to mind. Paying these “ad” companies for “customer” clicks. Over 95% of the clicks are from bots!! Can you say “cl;ass action”? So basically 95% of your ad dollars are wasted on “paid ads”. Buy a generic descriptive domain and put up a decent site.
It’s really not in Google’s interest to make money from fraudulent hits by bots. If the problem became big enough then everyone would stop advertising. Then Google would cease to make any money. That’s why Google really doesn’t want fraudulent clicks. Using bots to make fraudulent clicks is a great way to make money temporarily until you end up in prison.