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Fake web traffic has long plagued the online publishing world, but Dr. Paul Barford, computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is claiming the problem might be worse than suspected. And it's costing some of the top online advertisers millions in wasted ad impressions.
Dr. Barford, who is also the chief scientist at startup MdotLabs, is slated to present a study at an Internet security symposium Wednesday in Washington, D.C., where he we will claim that 10 traffic networks are serving up more than 500 million invalid ad impressions a month.
"We estimate the cost to advertisers for this fraudulent traffic to be on the order of $180 million annually," he said in a statement in advance of the presentation.
Dr. Barford reached his conclusion by posing as a web publisher and signing up for several different traffic generation services, also called PPV networks, which he filtered through software that uses anomaly detection to identify fake website traffic....
Fascinating research into social marketing and the growing problem of fake web traffic.Well worth reading.