Rooting out advertising fraud starts with knowing who exactly you're in business with

Industry trade association head, Randall Rothenberg, has called for the online advertising industry to “stop having unprotected sex”

In his scathing industry call-to-action, Rothenberg wrote:

“The supply chain by which digital advertising is created, delivered, measured, and optimized is so porous and perilous that it jeopardizes consumer trust and business growth. The risk is so severe that the underlying innovativeness of the Internet itself is in danger of grinding to a halt—unless the interactive advertising industry agrees to police its own precincts and root out the malefactors.”

The “unprotected sex” that Rothenberg is referring to is that haphazard practice of blind ad placement on websites with whom ad networks, exchanges, nor advertisers, have a real relationship, or basis for trust. Advertisers trust ad networks/exchanges, and ad networks/exchanges trust their publishers as well as other ad networks or exchanges, and yet in most cases, no one conducts real due diligence to verify the integrity of the publishers themselves—this is the fundamental flaw with the ad network model.

Solving the trust problem requires independent verification

Ad networks split revenue with their publisher networks, which creates a perverse incentive for ad networks to deliver as much traffic as possible to advertisers, without necessarily implementing thorough checks of their publisher partners—this lack of vetting is the weak link in the ad network model.

As a trusted independent third-party that is not incentivized by the publisher-to-network-to-advertiser transaction, PubChecker works with ad networks, ad exchanges and advertisers to vet the business continuity and integrity of website operators.  We employ tried and tested offline and online methods for vetting online publishers. Learn How →