BoSacks Speaks Out: How Ad Fraudsters Are Thriving During the Covid-19 Crisis

By BoSacks

Thu, Aug 27, 2020

BoSacks Speaks Out: How Ad Fraudsters Are Thriving During the Covid-19 Crisis

I have been a digital futurist for the publishing industry since the early 1990s and probably before that, depending on when you start counting my industry predictions. I still believe in the future of digital as THE most efficient and effective communication tool yet known to man. But my prognostications have always been tempered with pragmatism, as I am what I call a pragmatic optimist.

The web and all that it contains, the good and very bad, will be with us as far as one can see into the future. But while reading the article How Ad Fraudsters Are Thriving During the Covid-19 Crisis I was thinking, "How did it come to this?" Which is what King Theoden asked in the Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers. Now I ask the same question – How did it come to this? How can the advertising business lose $42 billion dollars in ad fraud while at the same time fraud-free, safe and proven magazines continue to lose ad dollars every quarter? How can there be so much excess revenue that an industry can lose $42 billion and do very little about it?

What do we know? We know that there are fake humans, click fraud, fake ad placement, ads paid for that are never seen, fake web sites that look real but aren't, all grabbing an obvious overabundance of loot. Not to mention the theft of our very selves. Our whole lives and families' interests bundled for sale not to the highest bidder, but to any bidder. The online automated advertising ecosystem is impossible to understand much less control under the current conditions we find ourselves in.

There is an abundance of data that shows that magazines are more trusted than any other delivery vehicle. Magazines are rated and respected by readers for top quality and accuracy in reporting. Yet, print which is trusted by all parties loses market share every year, while obviously fraudulent digital advertising despite the known fraud does nothing but grow. How did it come to this?

The agencies don't care about the fraud in the process, because they make easy money regardless of any scam, robots, unseen ads, and all the other dubious fundamentals that make up a great deal of the dishonest digital media industry. Until otherwise proven, the agencies are at the very root of the problem, because they "know" and do nothing.

Ad agencies are addicted to easy profits, and they are making too much money to alter their course. Obviously, there is too much greed and too much money for this to change any time soon. What do I expect to happen when the fraud hits $100 billion dollars of loss? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because there is no cure for greed.

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