Three years ago (in November 2014) our anti-fraud efforts at Zemanta flagged a set of sites with statistics that were too good to be true — lots of pageviews, lots of clicks, and low CPC. But those same sites also had low engagement after the click and virtually no conversions across multiple advertisers.

We carried out an in-depth analysis of all the traffic and traced those sites back to a single operating entity — 301 Digital Media. We did not find a smoking gun to definitively prove the traffic was not of human origin. However, we decided to stop buying it anyway and put those sites onto a blacklist. Since we are a DSP and not a network, we have the luxury of shooting first and asking questions later. We have access to so much inventory that we can afford to avoid dealing with certain sites and apps without impacting our or our advertisers’ businesses.

We believe the effort to fight ad fraud never stops and we’ll continue being as vigilant as possible. As you know, we also successfully avoided buying Methbot’s traffic a year ago.

Andraz Tori,
CTO at Zemanta, an Outbrain Company