“Fraud is priced in” is one of the most common reasons cited by marketers and media agencies to justify continuing to buy digital media, despite knowing there is ad fraud. They’re OK with there being ad fraud, because they got lower prices. But this misconception is causing marketers to spend even more on fake ads on fraudulent sites and apps.”
“Ads are bought at low prices and placed on thousands upon thousands of unknown sites, the exposure to ad fraud is much higher. Despite this, the low prices are so addictive to marketers and media buyers who buy media with a “Costco mentality” they continue buying it anyway. But no matter how low the unit cost, most of the ads are still worthless — i.e. won’t produce business outcomes for the marketer — because they are not shown to humans. “
“Large marketers allocate a digital media budget to some media agency to spend for them. The goal is to get as much quantity of ads as possible at the best possible prices (similar to TV ad buying). The media agency goes to the largest ad networks to negotiate for the largest quantity of ads they have and the best prices. The ad networks happily sell them a large number, perhaps even their “stretch goal” for the quarter. Keep in mind, these ad impressions don’t exist yet, until users visit web pages and cause the ads to load. These networks, in turn, go to medium and small networks to buy up whatever “volume” of ads they have to sell them. This process goes on one or more rounds, until someone magically finds a way to guarantee a specific quantity of ad impressions. “
“How do you think they got all that “guaranteed” volume? Are there a whole bunch of humans sitting around with nothing to do but to go to those specific websites? No. It’s far far easier and more reliable to just use bot traffic to generate whatever number of ad impressions you already sold.”
What Are The Economics Of Digital Ad Fraud by Dr Augustine Fau at Forbes