How Verification and Chumboxes Have Ruined the Web For Profit

This is a story about what happens when hygienic metrics are mistaken for measures of quality. You see, I usually raise an eyebrow when verification vendors sell their products ensuring “quality”.

They sell viewability, brand safety and fraud detection - binary hygienic metrics that indicate whether or not you should pay but not how much. "Marketers gonna market" though.

Then something I wrote about some domain shenanigans that chumboxes were employing to capture brand advertising dollars which kicked off a broader conversation about chumboxes, verification vendors and how they are teaming up to ruin up the internet for anyone who has eyeballs...just to line their own pockets.

Chumboxes are the box of ads you see at the bottom of articles that offer "clickbaity" content on what your childhood celebrity crush looks like or that one weird trick personal trainers don’t want you to know about. Stuff like this...

They earned their name by chumming the web with garbage while fishing for clicks. 

So here's how Chumboxes make money:

• Publishers get paid per click from the chumboxes they put on their site.
• Rates are pretty good, some publishers get about $.30 a click. 
• The Chumbox vendors that enable the ads take a cut of the publisher’s payment.
• The “publishers” arbitrage the cost of the click against the revenue generated by all the ads they can run on their page.  
• This incentivizes the publisher to run as many ads as possible which means these pages typically look like this:

Here's where the verification vendors become complicit in this perpetuation of "Quality Fraud".

A publisher playing this arbitrage game can deliver up to 200 viewable ads and videos in a 2 minute session. For a premium publisher like The New York Times it’s more like 10 ads.

This scam works great as long as verification vendors continually rate both sources of media as “brand safe, fraud-free and viewable”.

But is this a quality ad experience?

It’s this information asymmetry about the quality of media that chumbox vendors and longtail/low quality publishers use to create arbitrage opportunities. 

The money is being made at the expense of advertisers (who are getting ripped off) and premium publishers (who struggle to differentiate their quality product).

The first step towards protecting your own brand is as simple as visiting some of the sites that you are buying media on. If they look like traffic arbitrage, audit their quality with tools that offer more fidelity than verification vendors can offer. 

Just like any advertiser spending more than $50m/year on media should employ a specialized fraud vendor, smart advertisers are starting to look at attention metrics as a better indicator of media quality than the fairly toothless hygiene metrics offered by verification vendors.