Report: Fake Ad Schemes ‘Rotting the Internet’

Businessweek: Increasingly, viewers of digital advertising aren’t human. A study last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code to determine who or what was seeing them. Some 11 percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people. According to the study, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year. “In the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”