The Financial Times, the news publisher whose circulation grew 8 percent to 850,000 across digital and print last year, warned advertisers that the amount of ad spoofing on its website was shockingly high.
“The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping,” Anthony Hitchings, the FT’s digital advertising operations director, told Digiday. “The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organized crime.”
The publisher investigated domain spoofing on ad exchanges, where media buyers can buy “programmatic” ad space from a variety of websites. It found advertisers were being sold ad space that didn’t even exist in its digital inventory.
The FT estimated that the value of the fraudulent ad inventory was $1.3 million a month.
Jon Slade, chief commercial officer at the FT, planned to notify the exchanges by mail to remove the fraudulent ad inventory.
Domain spoofing has been a significant problem for advertisers on digital media. In December, web security firm White Ops uncovered “the Methbot Operation,” a sophisticated Russian-based cybercrime ring that spoofed online video advertising on a massive scale, Reuters reported.
The "Methbot" crew sold fictitious video-ad placements on brand-name websites, and faked viewership data collected by measurement providers. The operation was estimated to cost advertisers by as much as $5 million a day.
The spoofed websites included ABC.Go.com, CNBC.com, CNN.com, WSJ.com, Comcast.net, Discovery.com, Economist.com, ESPN.com, Facebook.com, FoxNews.com, MTV.com, NYTimes.com, Reddit.com, Verizon.com, Vevo.com and Variety.com.
The Financial Times has favored direct deals with advertisers, and programmatic ads only account for 5 percent of its ad revenue, Digiday reported.
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