Did Google Charge For YouTube Ads Viewed By Bots?

A study carried out by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, IMDEA Networks Institute, Polito and NEC Labs Europe has revealed that Google charges advertisers for YouTube ads viewed by bots and fraudsters. Yet, it also found that Youtube's fake view detection system beats all other online video portals by a long shot. This reason for this apparent contradiction is that public and monetised views are penalised differently, with YouTube being much more lenient when it comes to monetised views. 

While DailyMotion counted at least 60% fake views as valid, YouTube penalised all fake views when it came to the public view count. 

However, the picture looks starkly different when you compare the rate of false positives for the public view-counter against that of the monetised view-counter. 

Neither video ad view fraud nor the disproportionate burden of risk upon advertisers is news though. In December 2014, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the United States reported that on average, 23% video ad views could be fraudulent. Earlier in the same year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) formed an anti-fraud working group that released three "Anti Fraud Principles": 

1. Fraud Detection – Suppliers must implement technological and business practices to identify ad bots and illegitimate human activity, and prevent such traffic from being sold
2. Source Identification – Suppliers should provide assurances to buyers that inventory is from a legitimate source; one way to achieve this is by providing the specific URL of an ad placement
3. Process Transparency – Suppliers must provide details of the business and technical processes they have employed to meet the first two principles

The fact that the same penalisation schemes could be applied to both public and monetised views but are not, further re-iterates the need to establish "consistent" and "independently measurable" principles around the identification and expunging of fraudulent traffic.