Dive Brief:
- A new study from European researchers claims that advertisers are paying for robot traffic on YouTube.
- Research from NEC Labs Europe, UC3m, Imdea and Polito found YouTube would detect fraudulent video views, but still charge for ads served on those views.
- The researchers concluded that YouTube is the only online video portal they studied that is “implementing a sufficiently discriminative fake view detection mechanism,” but also “that YouTube only applies this mechanism to discount fake views from the public view counter and not from the monetized view counter.”
Dive Insight:
Marketers buying digital ads should be worried about whether their budget is buying real traffic. Research from a range of groups all found a significant level of digital ad fraud occuring in video. The most disturbing finding of the European study was that YouTube was able to detect fraudulent video views, but would still charge for ads served on those views. A separate study from ANA that found video ad fraud is close to 25%, compared to display ad fraud at 11%.
The study went to lengths to figure out the issue. They set up YouTube videos with AdSense accounts, and then set up AdWords accounts to run ads in the videos. The researchers then used software to drive bot traffic to watch the ads and videos, discovering differences between how YouTube registers the fake video and ad views.
According to the researchers, YouTube has frequently responded to such complaints by saying that any issue may come down to viewers who watch the ad, but not the video, thus accounting for an ad view but not a video view. However, the researchers programmed bots to fully watch both the ads and the video, which would seemingly discount that explanation.
When contacted by Marketing Land to discuss the findings of the study, a Google spokesperson said: “We’re contacting the researchers to discuss their findings further. We take invalid traffic very seriously and have invested significantly in the technology and team that keep this out of our systems. The vast majority of invalid traffic is filtered from our systems before advertisers are ever charged.”
Recommended Reading
Bloomberg: Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that way.
Marketing Land: Study Finds YouTube Advertisers Pay For Bot Views
Marketing Dive: Ad fraud, pirated content and malware are all-too-often connected
