For over a decade, annoying dickheads like me have been writing, screaming, and holding our breath about how marketers are being screwed blind by adtech con artists. It hasn’t done an ounce of good.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal had a major piece entitled ‘Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short.’ The piece was focused on something I’ve written about a lot – how the reports marketers get about their online campaigns are alarmingly unreliable.
Let’s start at the beginning.
First let’s take a look at the scope of fraud in online advertising. The Journal published this chart, from Juniper Research, which estimated online ad fraud in 2025 at over $100 billion.
You would think being screwed out of more than $100 billion in one year would cause some kind of angst in the ad community. Not a bit. We have normalized stupidity and incompetence to such an extent that all you hear are crickets.
Next, the Journal reported on a study by Adalytics that indicates the following:
- “The top three companies that advertisers pay to detect and filter out bots—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security—regularly miss nonhuman traffic.”
- “The report…found tens of millions of instances over seven years in which ads for brands including Hershey’s, Tyson Foods, T-Mobile, Diageo, the U.S. Postal Service and the Journal were served to bots across thousands of websites.”
- “This occurred even in cases when…
