New York, NY – DoubleVerify, the worldwide leader in online transparency, accountability and performance measurement has uncovered elaborate advertising Fraud activity on over 1,200 suspected websites that together are defrauding online advertisers of an estimated $6.8 million per month. This massive Fraud originates from user traffic on websites classified as copyright infringement.  The ad impressions from this traffic are ‘laundered’ through a complex series of redirects that make the ads appear as though they originated on legitimate sites containing advertiser-friendly content.  Further, the Fraudulent ads use code hiding the ad creative from being displayed in the user’s browser, resulting in advertisers paying for impressions that are never seen.

DoubleVerify’s Fraud Detection Lab has released new technology to uncover and protect against this wave of impression laundering Fraud.  This new technology is now fully deployed into DoubleVerify’s MRC-accredited Fraud identification and blocking platform to give customers the most powerful verification protection available in the market today.

DoubleVerify data scientists analyzed over 1,000 advertiser campaigns delivering more than 10 billion impressions on 3 million plus websites in a recent 30-day period to reveal the following results:

•          Over 1,200 websites in copyright infringement categories were laundering ad impressions through a set of seemingly legitimate sites with advertiser-friendly content.

•          3.0% of all Network/RTB-purchased impressions were delivered via sites participating in this Fraudulent activity.

•          0.1% of Publisher-purchased impressions were delivered via sites participating in this Fraudulent activity.  This likely occurs when publishers purchase third-party inventory for audience extension or other off-site fulfillment programs.

DoubleVerify estimates that impressions on the sites involved in this Fraud cost advertisers and legitimate inventory sellers nearly $6.8 million per month and have the following additional impacts on the industry:

•          Operational resources are wasted trying to identify Fraud and eliminate its impact on their campaign analysis, media planning and inventory management.

•          CPMs are depressed due to the artificial increase in supply caused by Fraudulent impressions and the lower ROI observed in segments that pool together Fraudulent and legitimate inventory.

•          Online advertising media dollars are unwittingly distributed to websites categorized as copyright infringement despite the best efforts of the industry’s good-faith participants.

“Copyright infringement is a significant issue that is siphoning dollars away from the creative community,” said Jon Taplin – Director of Annenberg Innovation Lab who has been working to drive awareness of and bring transparency to advertising on copyright infringement sites. “DoubleVerify’s identification of this impression laundering Fraud is a significant milestone towards cutting off the funds that these sites need to continue their operations. DoubleVerify’s technology and verification solutions are a welcome addition to the tools that advertisers, agencies, networks and exchanges can employ to ensure that advertising dollars are not contributing to the problem of copyright infringement.”

DoubleVerify’s solutions have been updated to systematically protect advertisers from this Fraudulent activity. Brands deploying the DV BrandShield proactive blocking solution will immediately cease serving ads to these sites, offering maximum protection. Those brands using the DV BrandAssure monitoring solution will see these sites flagged on their reports and their dedicated Performance Management team member will actively coordinate removal of these sites from the buy. Inventory sellers using the BrandShield Connect integration platform are further protecting their advertising campaigns with the heightened safety this solution offers on every impression they sell.

Full details of this Fraud analysis and new product enhancements are available in the DV Fraud Lab Report accessible online at www.doubleverify.com or by contacting your account representative.

About DoubleVerify

DoubleVerify (www.doubleverify.com) is the world leader in online media transparency, accountability and effectiveness insights. It is the top choice of brand marketers, agencies, advertising networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and digital publishers looking to ensure quality advertising environments, campaign transparency and performance. DoubleVerify validates over 60 billion advertising impressions per month for hundreds of Fortune 500 brands, advertising networks and media platforms. DoubleVerify was conferred the World Economic Forum 2012 Technology Pioneer Award for being one of the most innovative stakeholders in the technology space. Headquartered in New York City, DoubleVerify’s investors include JMI Equity, Institutional Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures.

*Fraud Definition and Clarifications

DoubleVerify’s MRC-accredited Verification solutions utilize two content categories to classify sites as Fraud and provide clarity for our customers:

Confirmed Ad Impression Fraud – Sites with significant direct evidence confirming that Ad Impression Fraud is taking place.  Ad Impression Fraud manipulates ad serving, ad display or traffic activity such that ad impression measurements are incremented inappropriately because the ads cannot be seen by a user, are not served within operationally viewable parameters or were displayed as a result of machine-generated traffic.

Suspected Ad Impression Fraud – Sites with significant circumstantial evidence that Ad Impression Fraud is taking place such as site data, traffic patterns, viewability data and relationships to sites with Confirmed Ad Impression Fraud. Ad Impression Fraud manipulates ad serving, ad display or traffic activity such that ad impression measurements are incremented inappropriately because the ads cannot be seen by a user, are not served within operationally viewable parameters or were displayed as a result of machine-generated traffic.

For the purposes of this release, any description of Fraud means Ad Impression Fraud.  Sites described as Fraudulent means those in this study that we have classified into the “Confirmed Ad Impression Fraud” or “Suspected Ad Impression Fraud” contextual categories.  Fraudulent activity or Fraudulent impressions means the advertising impressions on Fraudulent Sites

As used by the IAB Verification Guidelines, DoubleVerify contextual category definitions, this release, and related posts and reports, the use of the words Fraud, Fraud Site, Ad Impression Fraud, Fraud activity, Laundering, Laundering Site and other related terms are not intended to represent Fraud or Laundering as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes.

The statements made in this article regarding Fraud all relate to DoubleVerify’s observations and data collection during April 2013.  These statements shall not be construed to imply information or conclusions regarding activity that took place outside of the studied period.

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Integrations with Partners Include Turn and Over 15 Others

NEW YORK, NY - Integral Ad Science, the technology company dedicated to ensuring brand safe and high quality media environments, today announced that its programmatic pre-bid solution for online advertising fraud is now available via Turn and AppNexus. Integral’s solution is also leveraged by other leading companies in the industry including Chango, Federated Media, Magnetic, Media6Degrees, Media IQ, Netmining, PulsePoint, SHEKNOWS and ValueClick. MediaMath, The Trade Desk, BrandScreen, Digilant, QUISMA and several others are in the process of being fully integrated to provide the highest level of media quality and brand safety against a variety of fraudulent practices, such as click and impression fraud and botnet impressions.

Integral’s Suspicious Activity Detection product, released in 2012 to help the industry solve what AdWeek recently cited as a $400M annual problem, scores web pages to determine the risk of fraudulent or deceptive activity and proactively blocks ads in real time, before they appear on highly suspicious pages. The latest solution and integration with partners now enables brands and marketers to leverage predictive data in a programmatic pre-bid environment, to avoid bidding on fraudulent or highly suspicious inventory.

The industry generally defines fraud as the deliberate practice of attempting to serve advertisements that have no potential to be viewed by a human user. This includes botnet traffic, iFrame stuffing into a 1×1 pixel and ad stacking, which places multiple ads on top of one other in a single ad placement, with only the top ad in view. Despite some industry misconceptions, fraud is not adware, poor viewability placements or low-quality inventory.

Impression fraud and related techniques impact marketing budgets in a variety of ways. First, any advertiser paying for media on a CPM basis is paying for all of this fraudulent inventory. Other examples include:

Click Fraud: Programmatic clicking and unusual click activity, which is both deceptive, as it skews actual results, and detrimental to the bottom line in ads purchased on a CPC basis.

Attribution Fraud: Fraudulent activity stealing credit for sales within a CPA or CPV campaign, despite the fact that the ad impressions were not real and/or not in view. The theft is occurring as dollars funnel away from legitimate channels towards fraudulent ones who have placed the most/latest cookies before consumer purchase.

Compounding the issue, Integral’s data science reveals that if one form of fraud is present, additional fraudulent practices are often uncovered on the same page.

Integral’s suspicious activity technology encompasses analysis of each individual ad call (approximately two billion per day), and its solutions assess:

• Real time signals – Anomalies in a real-time ad call that are highly unlikely to have happened, as compared to legitimate activity.
• Cumulative evidence – Inconsistencies and/or suspicious activity across all the activity associated with a website or group of websites, user or group of users, leveraging over four years of technology, data science and machine learning capabilities.
• Predictive insights – Historic intelligence that flags a page with a high percentage of traffic coming from fraudulent sites, allowing advertisers to block ads or avoid bidding on impressions as necessary.

“We believe that black lists and other forms of published fraud reports would make the problem worse,” said Will Luttrell, CTO of Integral Ad Science. “These efforts would notify bad actors that they have been caught, at which point they simply register a new domain and continue their fraudulent activity. It is imperative that any and all solutions proposed to tackle fraud are proactive, predictive and both pre- and post-bid. This was our objective when we built our Suspicious Activity Detection last year, and it continues to be our focus as we integrate more partners into our pre-bid capabilities.”

“We leverage Integral Ad Science’s Suspicious Activity Detection to vet publisher domains before allowing them into the Federated Media network as well as against our ‘in production’ ad traffic to help combat the inherently dynamic nature of fraud,” said Tom Hart, VP of Ad Operations at Federated Media Publishing. “By applying their suspicious activity score in both the publisher on-boarding (pre) and ad delivery process (post), we’re taking active measures to ensure that brand advertising is protected from fraudulent activity and served to actual human readers.”

For more information, visit: http://integralads.com/our-solutions/ad-exposure.

About Integral Ad Science
Integral Ad Science is a technology company focused on ensuring safe, quality media environments for online advertisers. Employing the industry’s only media valuation platform, Integral Ad Science evaluates the media environment and establishes a TRAQ Score (True Advertising Quality), a first-of-its kind, quantifiable measure of media quality that ultimately benefits every media buyer, seller, publisher and trading platform. TRAQ score supports an advertisers’ ability to plan, execute and target their audience in an environment that reflects their brand image and drives ROI, while simultaneously setting benchmarks for publishers who wish to improve the quality of their content and design to attract premium advertisers. Integral is headquartered in New York with operations in San Francisco, London, Tokyo and Sydney. Learn more at http://www.integralads.com.

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Solve Media Q1 Market Advisory Update Shows Bots Continue to Impact the Effectiveness of Online Advertising Campaigns

NEW YORK – Solve Media (www.SolveMedia.com) issued its latest Bot Traffic Market Advisory update today, revealing an increase in bot traffic during the first quarter of 2013. The company identified that suspicious activity remained above 40 percent in Q4 2012 and Q1 2013. Further analysis showed that 29 percent of the suspicious activity in Q1 was the result of bot traffic, up from 25 percent in Q4.

Mobile bot traffic is also on the rise. Solve Media’s authoritative anti-bot security platform revealed that 29 percent of mobile traffic acted suspiciously in Q1 2013, 14 percent of which was confirmed as bots.

Not all of the traffic identified as mobile is in fact from a mobile device. Malicious hackers are increasingly writing code to masquerade as mobile users in order to take advantage of the lower security levels imposed on mobile users. Regardless of the true origin of the user, mobile bot traffic is an increasing concern for the advertising community. At the current level of mobile bot traffic, the industry is on pace to waste close to a billion dollars in ad spend in 2013.

“The barrier to entry for fraud and bots in mobile is almost nonexistent,” said Justin Somaini, Chief Trust Officer at Box, and the newest member of Solve Media’s Security Advisory Council. “The mobile bot levels reported by Solve Media should serve as a wake up call to both publishers and advertisers. Marketers will continue to demand a human audience.”

A geographic analysis revealed that Singapore and the United Arab Emirates have the highest levels of suspicious mobile traffic, at 71 percent and 67 percent respectively. In the US, suspicious web activity in Q1 reached 44 percent, and suspicious mobile activity reached 19 percent.

“With the increase in mobile advertising spending this year, it has become incredibly important for advertisers and agencies to be aware of the inefficiencies associated with serving mobile ads to bots,” said Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “It is up to publishers to implement anti-bot solutions and up to advertisers to seek out partners that take a real stance against bot traffic.”

Solve Media runs advertisers’ campaigns on its network, consisting of more than 6,000 publishers, and uses its proprietary TYPE-IN™ technology to prevent bot traffic, improve user experience, and guarantee human engagement. Solve Media’s anti-bot security platform specifically addresses bot traffic affecting publishers, ad agencies and advertisers by authenticating that audiences are, in fact, human. Solve Media is the market leader in the space, and has been monitoring and deterring bot traffic for more than three years.

Bots crowd web and mobile traffic and cause advertisers to pay for impressions and clicks that are not being engaged with by people. Malicious bots undermine the security of the web and cause harm, including stealing publisher content, creating spam assets and phishing.

About Solve Media
Solve Media (www.SolveMedia.com) was founded by veteran entrepreneurs and technologists focused on innovative Internet advertising and security solutions. The company’s proprietary online advertising platform, the TYPE-IN™, was designed to create highly effective opportunities for brands to engage online. With the platform, Solve Media guarantees brand message delivery, brand lift and return on investment for advertisers. Additionally, the platform creates new revenue opportunities for publishers, and saves time for consumers. Backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures, Bullpen Capital and prominent angel investors, Solve Media is based in New York City and Philadelphia.

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Spider.io (www.spider.io), a London-based ad technology company, has recently reported the discovery of a new ad botnet, the Chameleon Botnet – that emulates human visitors on select websites, causing billions of display ad impressions to be served to the botnet.

The news come just after a similar discovery reported by Microsoft and Symantec, who worked together on taking down of the Bamital botnet, used to defraud PPC advertisers at scale. “[...]in the last two years, more than eight million computers have been attacked by Bamital, and that the botnet’s search hijacking and click fraud schemes affected many major search engines and browsers, including those offered by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Because this threat exploited the search and online advertising platform to harm innocent people, Microsoft and Symantec chose to take action against the Bamital botnet to help protect people and advance cloud security for everyone“, reads the official Microsoft blog¹. By comparison, the Chameleon botnet reported by Spider.io appears way more damaging, with a reported monthly cost to advertisers of at least $6.2 million.

How It Works?
The Chameleon botnet works with individual bots running Flash and executing JavaScript, identifying themselves as coming from IE 9 on Windows 7 machines. They then try to replicate real, human behavior, generating clicks and even mimicking user engagement. The complex bot, unlike the more rudimentary ones, is careful to not trigger high CTR flags and sticks to the an average CTR of 0.02%. Furthermore, it is able to even generate mouse traces, thus making its identification more difficult.

Where’s the Bot?
More than 120,000 machines are reportedly infected with the Chameleon botnet, of which a massive 95% go online through residential U.S. IP addresses. According to the heat map provided by Spider.io², infected machines reside mostly on the West Coast and the South of the United States.

Where’s the Damage?
Spider.io observed the Chameleon botnet active within a cluster of 202 websites or more, websites serving 14 billion ad impressions per month of which at least 9 billion were associated with the Chameleon botnet. To aggravate matters further, at least 7 million distinct ad exchange cookies are associated with the Chameleon botnet every month, with advertisers losing $0.69 CPM for ad impressions faked by the botnet.

Who’s Behind the Bot?
Long story short, we don’t quite know. What’s suspicious, to put it this way, is that the bot appears to be revolving around the 202 websites mentioned above, so one could speculate that it’s either the publishers themselves or the ad networks and exchanges they’re employing. Spider.io did not name any of these publishers (although a quick search will put you on the right track) and did not comment yet as to who might be on the list of suspects.

To find out more, see Spider.io’s initial report of the Chameleon botnet, here: http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/

1. http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/02/06/microsoft-and-symantec-take-down-bamital-botnet-that-hijacks-online-searches.aspx
2. http://www.spider.io/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/infections600.png

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Online advertising start-up Reduce Data is an advertising analytics and optimization platform that leverages the power of big data to provide deeper insights into ad campaigns. Their declared aim is to increase media buying efficiency using a combination of real-time analysis, data models, machine learning, proprietary algorithms, and technologies that leverage big data in a cost-conscious manner.

With an estimated 30% average waste¹ across online and mobile ad spends, it is quite clear that many performance advertisers do not have the right tools to correctly quantify digital ad spends, therefore remaining unable to identify and eliminate waste. A good number of companies² do offer ad measurement services but, with many advertisers and agencies complaining over the costs of such services, newly launched Reduce Data seems to have found its place.

“We are different because we are focused on real-time optimization first, and on analytics and insights next. Using a real-time, big data platform, we are able to identify redundant users, click fraud, non performing creatives and other issues that impact the campaign ROI,” says Asif Ali, Reduce Data’s founder.

To address the issue of ad budget waste and to optimize ad spends, Reduce Data launched its independent platform built around three core functions:

- Analytics: Reduce Data provides ad network independent analytics at real time with ability to compare campaigns, channels or platforms.;

- Insights: Reduce Data’s real-time analysis delivers key data on user engagement, users across multiple campaigns, and creates comparative funnels for further understanding;

- Recommendations: Advertisers are presented with clearly formulated recommendations on how to reduce waste and optimize ad spends, all the way down to ad creative level. Possible recommendations can include reducing budget on a specific ad network, optimizing a landing page, eliminating poorly performing creatives, increasing budgets on high performing channels, campaigns, or ads.

Founder Asif Ali also walked us through some of the proprietary technologies behind Reduce Data’s platform:

- Ad Signature Rank: Building a real-time data driven ad signature ranking system that systematically up-votes or down-votes campaigns and ads based on signatures of ads.

- Real-time Analysis: Building an on-the-fly real-time analysis system for dozens of configurable rules that depend on dynamic data. The primary objective of this system is to identify spending waste and help optimize spends.

- User signatures: A common user signature across ad platforms and channels understands user profiles, patterns and conversions across campaigns.

- Low latency, low cost, high performance system: latency of 1 ms or lower, while aiming for very low processing cost.

To those curious to check out the user interface, I’m happy to report that it’s very friendly and intuitive – a few screenshots are lined up below.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, with an office in Chennai, India, Reduce Data’s beta platform has recently raised $0.5 million in funding from private investors in the US. Reduce Data is lead by founder Asif Ali, serial entrepreneur with 15 years experience in the tech and start-up environment, and advised by Rob Schoening, Khurram Zafar, Sameer Sondhi, Suresh Mathai.

More about Reduce Data can be found at www.reducedata.com, Facebook, and Twitter.

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All-Star Group of Industry Experts will Study and Address Growing Online Advertising Security Issues; Bot Traffic an “Extreme Concern” for Two-Thirds of Security Professionals, According to Survey Findings

NEW YORK – Solve Media (www.SolveMedia.com) announced the formation of the first Security Advisory Council specifically focused on online advertising. Inaugural council members include world-renowned information security experts Kevin Mitnick, Adam J. O’Donnell, Bruce Schneier, Chris Wysopal and Elad Yoran. Creation of the council was spurred by a recent Solve Media survey of 200 IT-focused online publishing professionals in which 69 percent said they were extremely concerned with bot traffic. Solve Media’s anti-bot CAPTCHA security platform specifically addresses bot traffic affecting both publishers and advertisers by authenticating that audiences are, in fact, human.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, interactive ad spend reached a record $17 billion globally in the first half of 2012 and is projected to be greater than print ad spend by Q4. Solve Media previously identified that as much as 10 percent of all online traffic is generated by bots. This means potentially $1.7 billion of online ad spending is wasted marketing to bots that will never become customers.

“Security is a growing concern for both advertisers and publishers as they recognize the substantial negative brand and monetary impact of bots,” says Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “Agencies prefer to work with publishers that have safeguards against bot traffic so they are not wasting ad spend, and publishers want to offer quality inventory. To improve the industry, we enlisted the top information security experts to discuss how best to address online security quandaries and advise our agency clients and publisher partners.”

The Solve Media Security Council will organize the industry’s best security minds around this issue to help deliver a solution that benefits advertisers and publishers. The Council is tasked with identifying ways to combat bots and other serious security issues plaguing online advertising, and providing expert guidance to advertisers and publishers seeking security help. Below is additional information about each council member:

· Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, cryptographer, author, and founder of BT Managed Security Solutions.Described by the Economist as a “security guru,” Schneier has testified before the US Congress and is the author of a dozen books including the bestseller Applied Cryptography. Bruce Schneier is a prominent international speaker who has presented at TED, RSA, DEF CON, and Hacktivity among many other events.

· Chris Wysopal is a Blackhat Review Board member and CTO of Veracode. He has been named one of the 100 most influential people in IT and an InfoWorld CTO 25. He has been lead security researcher for @stake and director of development at Symantec and helped to produce the Organization for Internet Safety. Wysopal is co-author of the award winning password auditing and recovery application L0phtCrack currently used by over 6,000 organizations worldwide.

· Kevin Mitnick is the NY Times Bestselling Author of Ghost in the Wires, and frequently cited as the world’s most famous hacker. He is well known for using social engineering tactics and has testified before the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. In a previous life, Mitnick successfully hacked into organizations including Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, and Fujitsu Siemens. He is currently CEO of Mitnick Security Consulting LLC.

· Dr. Adam J. O’Donnell is the Chief Architect in the Cloud Technology Group at Sourcefire, and the author of numerous academic papers regarding malware and network security. He has been cited in publications including IEEE Security & Privacy, CNET, & The New York Times.

· Elad Yoran Elad Yoran is the Chairman and CEO of Vaultive, Inc, and founder or executive director of security companies MediaSentry, Riptech, and Sentrigo which were acquired by SafeNet, McAfee and Symantec respectively. Yoran has been awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. He is a member of the FBI Information Technology Advisory Council, and is a regular speaker on innovation as well as IT security technology and market trends.

“I have spent my career counseling the masses on how security really works in the hopes of helping companies, organizations and the general public prevent online attacks and security breaches,” says Bruce Schneier. “Solve Media’s unique CAPTCHA solution is also helping to prevent security breaches by hampering bots access to advertiser, publisher and consumer data. I’ve joined Solve Media’s Security Council to further combat Internet security vulnerabilities.”

“It is important for security experts to understand vulnerabilities from the attacker’s perspective to be effective,” says Chris Wysopal, CTO of Veracode. “The steps Solve Media is taking to combat Internet bots is a solid start and my experience identifying and exposing Internet security vulnerabilities will help them build out their offering.”

“Having started my career hacking into some of the most secure government and corporate fortresses, I am fully aware of how serious a threat there is to public and private sector security,” says Kevin Mitnick, CEO of Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC. “I’m happy to bring my expertise to the Solve Media Security Council in the hopes of helping others protect their valuable information assets.”

“Solve Media has produced one of the most interesting solutions to the CAPTCHA generation problem that I have seen in a very long time, and I am very excited to help advise them on the security space at large,” said Dr. Adam J. O’Donnell, Chief Architect in the Cloud Technology Group at Sourcefire.

“My mission has always been to improve innovation within the security industry to better combat vulnerabilities,” says Elad Yoran, CEO of Vaultive Inc. “Solve Media embraced a similar mission in online advertising and their continued commitment is evident in their creation of this council.”

About Solve Media
Solve Media (www.SolveMedia.com) was founded by veteran entrepreneurs and technologists focused on innovative Internet advertising solutions and security. The Company’s proprietary online advertising platform, the TYPE-IN™, was designed to create new and highly effective opportunities for brands to advertise online. With the platform, Solve Media guarantees brand message delivery, brand lift and return on investment for advertisers. Additionally, the security platform creates new revenue opportunities for publishers and saves time for consumers. Backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures, Bullpen Capital and prominent angel investors, Solve Media is based in New York City and Philadelphia.

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AdBrite’s New Executive Team Challenges the Ad Exchange Status-Quo with All-Inclusive Tools and Features

San Francisco, CA – AdBrite, Inc., the leading independent online ad exchange, along with its new executive team led by CEO Hardeep Bindra, today announced new features and functionality for its all-inclusive exchange, benefiting both advertisers and publishers at no additional cost. These features include full URL-level transparency from its publishers, content classification into IAB ad categories powered by Peer39, click fraud monitoring by Adometry, a Publisher Floor Price Recommender developed in-house, and the AdBrite Intelligence campaign and audience measurement tool for advertisers.

“We are excited to announce these improvements to the AdBrite marketplace, putting us back on the map with capabilities and performance found in exchanges 15x our size,” said Bindra, who joined AdBrite in May from Yahoo! where he co-led the Right Media Exchange.“Our aim is to iterate on the marketplace by building capabilities that enhance transparency, build trust, and improve returns for publishers and advertisers, and offering these as a benefit of being in the AdBrite club. Reaching these milestones required a technical and business over-haul as well as a laser focus on quality and execution.”

While other ad exchanges offer similar features on an a la carte basis, only AdBrite applies all enhancements across the exchange at no additional cost. By partnering with technology companies with trusted brands and deep technical strengths, AdBrite has ensured that these new features are usable out of the box and will have a significant impact on improving monetization across its marketplace.

“We provide the air-bags without requiring you to drop a coin every time you drive the car,” added Bindra. “This combined with the additions to our executive leadership team, we believe, give us the winning formula to thrive.”

The trust and safety initiatives are being complimented with publisher and advertiser tools such as Publisher Floor Price Recommender and AdBrite Intelligence that further enhance impression pricing and cross-exchange buying behavior.

“Add these upgrades to our available ad-formats, from VAST/VPAID 2.1 compliant pre-roll video ads to in-banner rich media ads and mobile web, and the AdBrite exchange offers a unique and compelling value proposition for buyers and sellers,” said Joaquin Delgado, new CTO of AdBrite, who prior to AdBrite led the Science and Engineering teams at the Right Media Exchange.

“With our strengthened core tech, trust and safety advancements, and ad format variety, we’ve leveled the playing field and are ready to introduce the vibrant and improved AdBrite to the ecosystem,” states new VP of Business Affairs, John Underwood. Underwood, an advertising industry veteran, previously held C-level positions at various start-ups and was VP of AIM at AOL where he was instrumental in fostering deals with Google and Facebook.

About AdBrite
AdBrite Exchange is the largest independent advertising exchange, reaching more than 160 million U.S. unique visitors each month. With site-level transparency and an open platform for both data providers and real-time bidders, AdBrite maximizes selection and control for advertisers and publishers. For more information visit: www.AdBrite.com.

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New Research and Survey Results Show that Bot Traffic is a Growing Problem in the Digital Media Industry, Impacting Publishers and Advertisers

New York – Solve Media (www.SolveMedia.com) today revealed that 10 percent of all online traffic is generated by bots – software applications that run automated processes across the Web. eMarketer predicts online display ad spend will reach $15.3 billion globally in 2012, which means that potentially $1.5 billion in ads will be served to bots. Since 2011, Solve Media has witnessed a 400 percent rise in aberrant traffic across registration, voting, commenting and contact services on the web. The company’s CAPTCHA-based advertising technology provides security authentication solutions for publishers.

Bots harm publishers by stealing content, posting inappropriate comments and creating fake user accounts that can be used to launch other bot attacks. Advertisers are also negatively impacted by bots through wasted time and money spent marketing to entities that will never become customers. Both advertisers and publishers risk their reputations when bots are active on web sites.

“By working with Solve Media, we’ve taken the necessary steps to stop bot traffic that targets Meredith through our contest and sweepstakes entries,” said Andy Wilson, SVP of Digital Marketing at Meredith Corp. “These actions ensure the most positive experience for our users and our advertisers.”

Solve Media reviewed a monthly average of 100 million identity authentications from all of 2011 to August 2012 across 5,000 publishers. Key findings include:

· The majority of bot traffic comes from the U.S. based on total numbers.
· Singapore (56%) and Taiwan (54%) had the highest percentage of bot traffic; in the U.S., bots are 16% of total traffic.
· comScore observed that between 4% and 11% of ad impressions for given U.S. campaignswere delivered against bot traffic; web site security firm Incapsula estimates bot traffic to be 31%.

What Bots Do
Bots are computer programs that automate tasks, such as clicking on web page functionality or ads. When bots crowd web traffic, they cause advertisers to pay for impressions that are not being seen by human beings. Bots undermine the security of the web and cause harm by stealing publisher content, creating spam assets and posting inappropriate content.

“Security is a paramount concern for publishers and advertisers, as they continue to be victimized by bots. Publishers need rock-solid solutions to stop massive, global bot attacks that can happen at any time,” said Ari Jacoby, CEO of Solve Media. “Solve Media engineered its technology from the ground up with security at its core. No other ad technology company has the capabilities, experience and commitment we have to solving this problem.”

Jordan Rohan, Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst, Stifel Nicolaus and Co. added, “Bots present a much larger threat to display advertising than most advertisers understand. Solve Media addresses this problem head on through human authentication, while also providing an effective advertising platform.”

To protect against bots, advertisers should:

· Seek cost-per-engagement (CPE) media opportunities that demand human cognition.
· Embrace publishers that have proactively implemented an anti-bot solution.
· Demand third-party attitudinal research that confirms effectiveness of ads.
· Require site transparency on all network buys.
· Implement attribution tracking technology on all video buys.

“The existence of non-human traffic is an issue that affects the entire digital ad ecosystem,” said Kirby Winfield, SVP of Corporate Development, comScore. “comScore research has shown that a significant percentage of ad campaigns are delivered against non-human traffic, which represents waste for advertisers that can diminish their confidence in the medium. Any efforts to quantify the magnitude of this problem and validate ad delivery represent a step in the right direction for digital.”

About Solve Media
Solve Media was founded by veteran entrepreneurs and technologists focused on innovative Internet advertising solutions. The Company’s proprietary online advertising platform, the TYPE-IN™, was designed to create new and highly effective opportunities for brands to advertise online. With the platform, Solve Media guarantees brand message delivery, brand lift and return on investment for advertisers. Additionally, the platform creates new revenue opportunities for publishers and saves time for consumers. Backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures, BullpenCapital and prominent angel investors, Solve Media is based in New York City and Philadelphia. http://www.solvemedia.com

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