MoPub partners with Pixalate, DoubleVerify to fight in-app ad fraud

MoPub announced Tuesday it is partnering with Pixalate and DoubleVerify to help reduce invalid traffic (IVT) and in-app ad fraud on the Twitter-owned mobile ad exchange. Pixalate and DoubleVerify are accredited by the Media Rating Council (MRC) as mobile IVT-management vendors.

Why you should care

As investment in mobile advertising has taken off, so have opportunities for ad fraud. In-app ad fraud was estimated to have cost the industry nearly $5 billion in 2018. MoPub’s integrations with Pixalate and DoubleVerify are aimed at vetting traffic signals and blocking invalid bid requests in real-time, pre-bid and analyzing post-bid activity to help publishers improve their traffic quality.

Signals used to detect IVT will include:

• Viewability rates and ad implementation
• App store rankings, user downloads, descriptions and market reach
• App content, user experience and ad capabilities
• General invalid traffic (GIVT) and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) fraud signals, including clicks and impressions generated by crawlers, scripts and agents; illegitimate traffic based on device and ad-tag hijacking; spoofed source information by Device ID and Bundle ID.

MoPub’s head of product Boris Logvinskiy said bringing on Pixalate and DoubleVerify as partners was a crucial step in company’s goal to eliminate ad-fraud on its ad exchange. “MRC-accredited vendors like Pixalate and DoubleVerify offer the expertise, technology, data integrity and service needed to help us keep a clean exchange for the trillions of ad requests that we facilitate,” says Boris Logvinskiy

More on the news

• MoPub says, with the help of Twitter’s policy operations team, it vets publishers before they’re on-boarded and penalize any who are non-compliant.
• The company reports it currently has more than 180 DSP partners and more than 50,000 mobile apps on the exchange.
• Pixalate received its MRC accreditation for sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) detection in July, 2017 and DoubleVerify was accredited in December, 2017.