AppNexus Expands Inventory Quality Initiative Through Partnership with White Ops

AppNexus will Adopt White Ops’ Technology Layer to Power Pre-Bid Fraud Prevention Across The AppNexus Marketplace

AppNexus, the world’s leading independent advertising technology company, announced a partnership with the cybersecurity company White Ops to shut down the flow of advertising dollars to cybercriminals. Through this partnership, AppNexus will adopt White Ops’ technology layer to power pre-bid fraud prevention across the AppNexus Marketplace and extend its in-house Inventory Quality team’s focus to include advanced research on emerging challenges like hate speech and “fake news” and formats like video and native.

“The only way to end digital ad fraud outright is to change the economic incentive system,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO, AppNexus. “By adopting White Ops’ industry-leading prevention and detection technology, we can leverage our marketplace scale to cut bad actors off from their revenue before—not after—they have defrauded the advertiser. We’re making this the default standard on the AppNexus Marketplace, and hope others will follow suit to make ad fraud punitively expensive for criminals to pursue.”

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Currently, bad actors employ various techniques to siphon advertising dollars away from legitimate publishers, such as creating sites that are solely designed to generate advertising revenue. Cybercriminals may also generate traffic and sell it to digital publishers, which is the fundamental failure of the digital advertising supply chain: if traffic looks human and eludes detection systems, it drives revenue for both the publisher and the bad actor. These problems have persisted because the sophistication and scale of fraud continue to grow rapidly while companies across the digital advertising ecosystem use different detection methodologies that vary widely in effectiveness and slow down collaboration. Most of these solutions are built or incentivized to detect traffic after it has been transacted.

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“The fight against malicious botnets is about winning an asymmetric economic warfare,” said Sandeep Swadia, CEO, White Ops. “Bot operators invest heavily in imitation and evasion techniques to perpetrate mass exploitation through ad fraud and information manipulation. This is why AppNexus, with its breadth and presence across the web, is an important partner in this good fight. Our joint mission is to strike at the heart of the ad fraud by shutting down the flow of dollars to fraudulent criminals. This broad counteroffensive will be good for the ad industry and good for the entire internet.”

“We hope that every major company in the ecosystem joins us to make White Ops the standard for eradicating fraud across the internet,” continued O’Kelley. “Fraud is pervasive because there are many entry points, and more shared data points will make it easier to shut bad actors down across every exchange. The current approach passes liability down the line after fraud has occurred. That’s the wrong incentive system. It’s time for every major exchange to join forces in making it prohibitively expensive for fraudsters to profit.”

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