What’s old is new. Time is a flat circle. Trends are cyclical.
Choose your idiom, because this week’s episode grapples with two topics that are not new to online advertising, but have both roared back into the public consciousness. The first is the scourge of bot traffic, scrutiny courtesy of a recent Adalytics report, and the second is the ongoing lack of traction among video games trying to monetize with ads.
Bot traffic is supposed to be a solved problem by now. All the major verification companies and ad tech vendors have integrations and products in place that are understood to filter out most if not all bot activity. Some brands pay millions of dollars per year for these services.
Thing is, it turns out that even unabashed bots that self-declare in every way – and appear on the IAB’s list of known spiders and crawlers – are still often misidentified as human traffic.
To catch these bots “should be trivial,” says AdExchanger Senior Editor Anthony Vargas, who wrote extensively about the Adalytics report. After all, bot filtration can be executed with the flip of a switch by Cloudflare, the web content delivery and infrastructure company – and it’s about, oh, 100% effective.
Except, as Vargas notes, bot traffic makes up a surprisingly large percentage of online traffic; as much as 40%, by some estimates. Setting aside malicious bots designed to fraudulently extract ad revenues and/or spread malware, there are bots that serve a real positive purpose, including for online research, search engine indexing and aggregating data for academic analysis.
And those bots constantly trawl the entire web.
Then, in the second half, we’ll give you the low-down on the IAB PlayFronts, which took place earlier this week in NYC. The video game world gathers there annually to make its pitch for programmatic demand. It’s like the TV upfronts, but without all the money.
Gaming ads have proven a siren song for ad tech in the past. Everyone wants a piece of that highly-engaged attention.
But it’s not easy making ads fit within the context of gaming – or creating standardized ad placements when, like Roblox’s portal ads, many gaming ad units are intrinsic to the mechanics of a specific game.
There are many unanswered questions – but also a great deal of potential revenue if anybody can find good answers.
