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.
zvelo’s granular taxonomy supports nearly 500 topic-based, malicious, phishing, objectionable and sensitive categories for brand safety and contextual targeting applications. zvelo’s data is unmatched in quality and veracity to ensure a brand’s ads can safely be placed on pages with content aligned to the brand’s image, mission, and target audience.
Ad Age looks inside Google’s war on ad fraud Ad Age had an opportunity to look inside the hood of Google’s war on ad fraud and the article is an eye opener for those who really have never looked into the dark places on the web. Although long, the article is well worth reading to…
On April 22nd, 2015, zvelo Chief Security Scientist, Mark Ryan Talabis presented a five minute video on buying low cost Internet traffic to replicate ad fraud. First he set up a honeypot site; then he shopped some blackhat traffic vendors and tested 10 providers in his experiment. He found that the lowest cost traffic was…
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.
Ad fraud continues to plague the online advertising industry and advertiser trust in automated ad-serving technologies continues to dwindle. It’s not just traditional display advertising that’s susceptible. Digital video and mobile advertising are seeing their fair share of bot (non-human) generated impressions and clicks as well. zvelo has recently become an Associate Member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to help mold industry best practices to combat ad fraud.
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.