Chase had ads on 400k sites, then on just 5k, with same results

2 - The exchange would likely make more because the increased auction pressure from the same amount of advertisers trying to buy the same amount of volume (same demand) on a smaller list of websites (lower supply) would lead to higher prices being paid to show ads.

So many commenters are giving the customer a hard time for realizing, "99% of my budget is spent on zero value, i.e. fraud."

The biggest lie the online advertising industry has sold is aggregate statistics. Of course a handful of traffic sources convert massively while the supermajority (99%) don't convert at all. Advertising intermediaries rely on the statistical mean to hide all the garbage in the gold. It should surprise no one that for the vast majority of customers, like Chase, conversion as a function of source is skewed.

I suspect too many ad tech companies rely on the ignorance of their customers to make money. They monetize the basic math of "if it's more than break-even, it's working"—in other words, their objective is to take as much ad budget as possible while still delivering a profitable conversion for the customer. By simple math, ad tech uses garbage inventory until the customer's profit is close to but above zero. It works, and you'd have to be a real blowhard to believe that it's not how the ad tech ecosystem works.

That ad-tech does this by laundering e-mail spam, blogspam and other forms of spam into Google AdWords: that's the real fraud. All those Googlers then go on to pretend like it's not happening.

I mean, what 400,000 sites do you think Chase was advertising on? Ones that really have to do with banking? Or just ones that, by some idiotic metric, have a keyword that ".equals('banking')"?

I would love for someone at Google's direct navigation ads (or whatever ridiculously obscuring name they're called now) to come out and say how "Nobody clicks twice [on spam ads] by accident." It's like they inhabit a make-believe universe. The ad exchanges aren't ignorant: they're facilitating the massive fraud of their own customers.

The issue I'm seeing is that there are many orders or magnitude more potential content providers out there than people are willing to manually validate and white-list.

This might lead us to a situation where only the largest content providers/creators still get access to ad money which in turn will make it impossible for creators targeting a more niche audience to still have a chance in the market.

Case in point: lately I'm totally into science videos on YouTube. From the more mainstream "Space Time" to the now-not-as-niche-as-in-2012 "Cody's Lab".

While the latter doesn't share the former's production values nor budget, it's YouTube ad revenue that allows both to exist and to me personally, both provide equal value.

It concerns me that in the future, if this trend continues, only one of the two will have a chance to survive.

This is just complete mis-management of paid media. Fire the agency or internal people for stupidity..

If so, the fact that they don't see an impact in # of impressions means more about the ad exchange's bidding system and inelastic demand (or lack thereof) for inventory on those whitelisted sites.

I don't think this has anything to do with fraud.