MADISON, Wis., June 10, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MdotLabs, the leading media security platform, today announced that it has validated more than 1 billion monthly impressions for several companies during a rigorous certification process. As a result, Beliefnet, Rant Media Network among other digital publishers - have become MdotLabs' AdSecureTM Platform customers and can reassure buyers that their traffic is protected by a new "Verified by MdotLabs Publisher Certification" program.
In response to rampant fraud in online advertising traffic, late last year MdotLabs' launched its AdSecure Platform, the only prophylactic solution using direct measurement to detect the true nature of online visitors to web and WAP sites. Today, MdotLabs launches its Publisher Certification Program enabling potential advertisers and their agencies to verify whether or not a particular publisher is MdotLabs certified and thus protected from questionable ad traffic.
"Fake impressions account for about half of all available display inventory," says Mdotlabs Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Dr. Paul Barford. "That puts display fraud waste at $10 billion annually in the U.S. alone. That doesn't include video, mobile, or the rest of the world. We believe the estimate would easily top $30 billion on a global basis. Major Brands that have been victimized include American Express, Allstate, Maybelline, GE Capital, Disney, Toyota, Comcast, Subway, LL Bean, Farmers, Starbucks, and Honda."
AdSecure is deployed via a simple JavaScript snippet with online advertising creative and on websites and can be integrated directly into exchanges, DSPs, SSPs and audience measurement platforms. The program identifies a wide variety of traffic generation threats so online advertisers and publishers can be sure they're reaching real people. AdSecure's early threat-detection enables publishers to avoid bot traffic from a growing list of fraudulent traffic-generation techniques such as click farms and pay-per-view networks. Queries from Publishers and Advertisers can be addressed to: certified@mdotlabs.com.
"There has been a lot of industry wide discussion about the prevalence of fake traffic, click farms, bots and other unscrupulous tactics used to inflate website traffic numbers. Beliefnet has been blessed with impressive traffic growth over the last several years and we wanted a third party to help validate this growth and ensure our advertisers that they are partnering with a site that generates quality traffic," says Jeremy McGee, Chief Operating Officer for Beliefnet. "Additionally, as we explored ways to further increase our traffic, the concern of whether the new traffic sources were generating the same quality traffic that our advertisers have come to expect from Beliefnet always existed. AdSecure helped address this by providing real-time visibility into the quality of our traffic from a sophisticated third party."
"We've had a traffic quality initiative on our books for more than a year and used a variety of technologies to attempt to identify low quality sources," says Doug Jones, CTO of Rant Media Network. "But ultimately, the data was not timely and there was simply too much of it to draw any real conclusions. AdSecure was easy to install and gave us actionable insights to make real-time decisions."
"As ad fraud has become a key issue to advertisers, high quality publishers are differentiating themselves from the scammers by proactively working with MdotLabs to protect their ad clients' campaigns," says Timur Yarnall, CEO and co-founder of MdotLabs. "These publishers realize they have the most to lose from ad fraud. If they can't show an advertiser the value in buying their high quality inventory - rather than the fake inventory from a scammer- then they lose their entire investment in creating valuable content and building credible traffic."
MdotLabs (MdotLabs.com) is a SaaS security platform company created to fight invalid activity in web and mobile advertising. The MdotLabs AdSecure™ Platform is used by hundreds of publishers and top brands to identify and eliminate invalid traffic coming from botnets and click-farms that waste billions in ad campaign spend each year. MdotLabs is privately funded and based in Madison, Wisconsin, with an office in Palo Alto, California.