Mobile Ad Fraud (Part 1): The Continued Battle

In 2016, we addressed one of the biggest issues in our industry with our post on ?The battle against mobile ad fraud?. Since then, the industry has made significant progress towards combating mobile ad fraud, but as we all know, this is a continuous battle with no clear silver bullet. With mobile ad spend projected to reach $87 billion by the end of 2019, there is also a parallel risk for increased fraud exposure across the growing mobile ecosystem. By nature, the mobile in-app environment can help reduce fraud exposure, specifically across platforms like ours who have curated supply sources with only SDK-direct app publishers, but in most cases, sophisticated fraud can still exist. As they say, there is true strength in numbers, and here at Chartboost, we?re working to promote a collaborative mindset. Fraud is an industry issue, which means all industry participants play an important role in addressing the issues and concerns from our mutual customers. The industry is becoming more aware of the need to control where the inventory is coming from. This directly ties into a known industry exercise call Supply Path Optimization (SPO). SPO allows direct marketers and technology platforms to optimize the channels they source their inventory from. In this case, those partners who power SDK-direct solutions are reinforced as having direct integrations with publisher apps help to minimize intermediaries and provide a trustworthy path to the end publisher. Additionally, the IAB Tech Lab is doing a great job putting together supply chain solutions (Ads.cert technology, app-ads.txt?). 2019 is the year of implementing the necessary pieces to increase the safety and reliability of our ecosystem.MMPs and attribution vendors have also developed their own anti-fraud solutions. Though they vary in terms of methodology, they are in a good position to help customers and partners with insight as to what may or may not be fraudulent inventory or installs. Most of these solutions include APIs that share specific signals and data that are critical to chase non-human traffic.As the ecosystem continues to evolve with more industry collaboration, we strongly believe there?s a promising future to effectively combating fraud at scale. Be sure to follow our mobile ad fraud series as we explain specifically how Chartboost plans to take a firm stance on fraud and how we continue to promote a safe buying and selling ecosystem for our partners.