Yahoo is fighting online ad fraud by partnering with several third-party measurement companies, including comScore, DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Moat and others, to enable independent verification of display and online video ads that appear on its sites. The move allows advertisers running campaigns on Yahoo to choose from a number of different measurement solutions to verify that they're getting appropriate returns on the money spent to place ads.
Outright fraud, along with issues around ads' viewability--such as how many seconds a video ad is viewed before it "counts" as a view and the advertiser is billed--is an ongoing issue online. A report by WhiteOps and ANA forecasts losses from "bots" alone at $6.3 billion in 2015.
"At Yahoo, we believe advertisers should have the flexibility to verify viewability and fraud levels with the tools of their choice, which is why we're partnering with leading independent measurement companies to give our customers the confidence they deserve when running campaigns on our inventory and across the web," said Dennis Buchheim, VP of product management for Yahoo, in a release.
All of the third-party measurement companies selected are aligned with or accredited by the IAB (International Advertising Bureau) and the MRC (Media Rating Council). Both organizations are taking a new look at and adding recommendations for issues like viewability: For example, the IAB recommended in its December "State of Viewability Transaction 2015" report that campaigns should achieve a 70 percent viewability threshold for measured impressions.
Integral Ad Science CEO Scott Knoll said in the release that transparency from publishers and tech companies like Yahoo is important, as is accountability. "We hope the industry will follow Yahoo's lead in working with independent, accredited companies like ours that are not involved in buying or selling media, as that is the only way to get a truly unbiased read-out on viewability and fraud."
For more:
- see the press release
- and this IAB report
On the Hot Seat: Yahoo's Utzschneider on the potential of cross-platform advertising
Related articles:
For Google's YouTube and Yahoo Screen, mobile ad strategy takes key role
Yahoo, AOL debut new series as original content race enters next stage
Hispanic audiences, and $1.5T in buying power, trend toward OTT