AdTech’s Dirty Little secret…
In June 2023 we saw not one, but two significant issues with inventory quality in programmatic buying reported by the mainstream press.
The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) which represents the largest advertisers in the US & Globally announced its research found that on average low quality sites accounted for 21% of impressions delivered & 15% of budget.
At the end of the month the Wall Street Journal reported that Google’s YouTube partner network was serving video advertising across inventory that was to put it politely low quality at best. In some campaigns between 42 to 75% of ad spend was allocated to sites & apps which didn’t even meet Google’s own quality standards.
The sad truth is the web is full of low quality sites that take money away from respectable publishers and deliver very little in return. The cost might to advertisers might even be as much as $13 billion globally. So how does this keep happening & why is the problem so big?
Buyers can avoid this rubbish by using our inclusion lists but really Adtech shouldn’t be carrying inventory this low quality inventory in the first place.
So why do some advertising platforms including those run by Google carry low quality inventory? There are two views for why this might be:
Whilst Advertising platforms have inventory quality teams it is hard to vet hundreds of thousands of websites & billions of pages for inventory quality.
Because of this immutable fact many argue these platforms should only carry inventory from respectable publishers & high quality sites.
So why not do this? Well advertising platforms make money from inventory whether it is reasonable quality or not, If $13 Billion really is how much money is spent on low quality inventory, then advertising exchanges are making $1.17billion per year from the sale of inventory and on the buy side DSPs are making a similar amount by buying it.
AdTech will argue that they should not be the arbiter of what is low quality and what is not, but really if they want to be seen as providing ‘well lit’ trustworthy environments to do business they need to get a handle on this issue & say no to the making a quick buck from these MFA sites.
Until they do the decent thing you can download and target our free inclusion list and stop worrying about this low quality rubbish appearing in your buys.
