Google acquires Spider.io to fight ad fraud

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Approximately £6 billion (US$10 billion) a year is what online ad fraud costs advertisers and Google’s latest acquisition of specialist ad fraud firm Spider.io, for an undisclosed sum, will add to Google’s ad fraud fight.

Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of display advertising says that, “By including Spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem”.

Spider’s speciality is identifying programmes that defraud advertisers through false traffic and other means and Google’s first priority will be to include the technology in their display and video ad products.

Most notably, Spider.io came to the fore in March last year when it identified a botnet called Chameleon. That botnet was said to have cost advertisers $6 million in revenues.

Earlier this year, a survey by Solve Media revealed that the amount of wasted advertising dollars is expected to rise 22% from 2013 totaling a whopping $11.6 billion in 2014. Almost 6 in 10 (59%) of the 7,500 agency media buyers responding to the survey said bot traffic negatively affects online campaign performance and 41% said it leads to inefficiencies and steals advertising budgets.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.