Online advertising has become a central part of our digital lives. Advertising publishers and platforms supply billions of ads every day. Ensuring that ads served are contextually accurate and brand safe for the target audience is critical to a safe and secure internet.
The Ad Tech Platform Provider needed to enhance the depth and coverage of its business intelligence offering by extracting as much information as possible from web pages being used for online advertising by some of its…
DetailsAn Experiment in Buying Internet Traffic zvelo Chief Security Scientist, Mark Ryan Talabis, wanted to see if he could buy Internet traffic and if so, would the traffic actually be human generated or would it be driven by bots or of low quality. He performed an experiment by setting up a honeypot site (essentially a…
I recently read an article that predicts global ad tech revenue will rise from a forecasted humble $30 billion for 2015, to $100 billion in 2020. If ad tech were a country, it would have a larger economy than 120 countries. That is a great deal of money. That is so much money, in fact,…
As a media buyer previously, I was always frustrated with the lack of tracking on iOS in mobile inventory. However, it was possible to track performance on Android and as Android’s market share grew, so did the conversions attributed to mobile display. Mobile apps, however, were another story altogether – as a performance shop, I…
How Ad Networks are Being Used for Scamvertising The Internet age has shown us a myriad of online scams, from get rich quick schemes to winning the lottery, typically originating via an email hook. This is a blind way of distributing scams, since scammers have no way of knowing if the scam is relevant to…
Advertisements are everywhere, from print publications to road-side billboards, and of course TV and on the Web. The intent of advertising is no different regardless of the medium. Advertisers are constantly feuding to win over consumer sentiment. On the Internet, ad-serving technologies have become so advanced that ads can now be targeted based on one’s individual web browsing history and behaviors, likes, shares, location, device type and other factors. From time to time, however, ad placements land severely out-of-context, and here is one such example of online advertising gone bad.
zvelo once offered 53 categories that were used to classify content on websites about Businesses & Services, Politics & Law, Portal Sites and others. This was later raised to 141 categories to help cover even more topics. The latest version boasts nearly 500 categories, making it one of the most granular categorization sets in the industry. We’ve managed to upgrade our categorization systems to better serve the needs of our existing and future technology partners and following is one example why this matters.
Given the dynamic nature of the majority of today’s websites, categorization at the full path URL versus the base domain is superior and now required. Parts of a website include the top-level domain (.com, .org, etc.), the base domain (example.com), sub-domain (subdomain.example.com) or sub-path (example.com/page). When categorizing content, it is highly important to recognize exactly what is being classified within a website because content can differ dramatically across full path URLs.
zvelo has received many requests from its technology partners who are in the web filtering and parental control sectors to institute and support a new category that can be used to identify websites that promote self-harm behaviors. As a result of such demand, a new “Self Harm” category has been added to the zveloDB® URL database.
Reports are plentiful of non-human bots gaming the online advertising industry by delivering fraudulent impressions and click traffic, and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) took note. The IAB released the “Traffic Fraud: Best Practices for Reducing Risk to Exposure” on December 5, 2013, to help online media buyers, publishers and ad networks mitigate the dilemma.