Are video pre-roll companies being scammed out of millions?
Every so often I go on the lookout for what I believe to be obvious scams in the industry. This time I decided to examine a specific pop-up that I had been seeing. A large video website called “TopTVBytes” has been popping up and under from a variety of websites that I was visiting with video advertising being run automatically. The purpose of these pops seemed obvious to me at the time – they were trying to drive traffic to their website, because in theory the value of the pre-roll and the additional advertisements on the page would pay more than the cost of the pop. I thought this was interesting and pretty straight forward, but after talking to some players in the industry, it seemed that there was something else going on beyond TopTVBytes, and advertisers were the ones paying for it.
A simple search of TopTVBytes confirmed that they were being promoted at some point through some interesting means, including adware, spyware and trojans. I emailed Ben Edelman, who told me that in his reports he himself had tracked down them being promoted via these methods, including invisible traffic. According to Alexa, one of the top sources of traffic was from Zedo, an adserver that is very popular with adware and pop companies because both the low cost of serving and easy integration into those programs. It was obvious that TopTVBytes, who was making money off the serving of pre-rolls, was being promoted at sometime in the recent past via what could be called questionable means. Why was this happening and who was responsible?
It was hard to track down who owned TopTVBytes: there was no phone number, the registration as anonymous and even with some detective work, I could only find connections to offshore corporate attorneys located in Bermuda. Still, to TopTVBytes credit, someone returned my email sent to a contact on their website. I spoke to a representative, Neil Weingberg, from “Involved Media, LLC” a New York State Corporation owned by him that was registered to an apartment in NYC. According to him, “we work with many video networks and advertisers directly. We use many methods to ensure that they are not promoted via nefarious methods, including hiring expert Ben Edelman” to track down the bad players.” He said that while he doesn’t want to make their company and himself to be a victim but he does blame some networks for what goes on. He mentioned one example, where he found Understone Networks promoting their website in an iframe banner, showing the entire website in the iframe banner.
He said that TopTVBytes, despite having a history of problems, does not allow or condone their website to be shown in adware, spyware and other methods, but admitted that they sometimes do promote their website through pop-up and pop-unders. He said that the advertising networks are well aware of the different methods employed in promoting the websites. “Some cases when we need to fulfill large deals,” said Weinberg,” we run on pop-ups.” He made it very clear that in those cases they are completely transparent with the network that they are using this as a method of promoting the pre-roll videos and their own website.
I spoke briefly with Tod Sacerdoti, the CEO of Brightroll, perhaps the largest video advertising network in the world. He described the industry as being rife with tons of fraud. According to him, everyone knows of this company TopTVBytes and how they are promoted and described them as a bad-actor. “The bad actors are limited to a very high volume, small group of video publishers and video ad networks,” said Sacerdoti, “Everyone knows who they are, and they know who these bad actors are.” He told me that nothing was being done to remove these companies from the revenue stream because of a “lack of interest to change this systemic problem” by the ad networks involved. In an article written by him on MediaPost, that he pointed out to me, he write “we believe at least 25% of all video advertisements served on the Web are served in a fraudulent manner, and that most of those ads are served by major players on behalf of big-name marketers.” Wow.
Is TopTVBytes to blame? I spoke also to Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media who made it clear that they do work with TopTVBytes and consider them to be a good player and have “always had positive experiences with the company”. He said that they make it very clear that no website that they work with promotes their videos in a pop method, and they used DoubleVerify and Ben Edelman also to make sure that their video advertising isn’t promoted in a questionable fashion. He seemed to feel that TopTVBytes wasn’t behind the questionable advertising methods themselves.
In one of the examples of the TopTVBytes pops, YuMe networks, another video advertising company was being heavily promoted. Among other things, I got several advertisements for various products being shown without sound from the pops. I reached out to YuMe networks to find out if they allowed this method to be employed to promote their advertisers, and no one at the time of publication returned my call or email to their CEO. While I couldn’t confirm that their advertisers did not want their ads being promoted via automatic plays in pops, I would find it hard to believe they wanted that specific way. TopTVBytes told me that YuMe networks is aware that they used different methods, including pop-unders and pop-ups to market the videos.
It seems that the video advertising industry provides a great service, but that there are some serious issues with the industry. When I started the article, I tried to keep an open mind to what was happening, but it was hard to believe that TopTvBytes wasn’t a bad actor cheating advertisers – the Google search of them showed numerous problems of their promotion methods, and the call to BrightRoll made it seem that the industry was fraudulent everywhere. However, as I spoke to more people, it wasn’t as clear that they were to blame. It seemed the industry was more to blame including the general lack of transparency. Last year, Adweek wrote about this issue, pointing out that many dubious methods were allowed at one time by major video ad networks.
As Jason Glickman mentioned, there are a lot of great fraud detection services that have started in video advertising recently, and those services have helped police the video advertising industry. It was clear that companies like Tremor and Brightroll take this extremely seriously – but as they both admitted, there were still people on a daily basis finding new ways to scam their companies. Still, from the sound of it, the problem remained because there were some networks that allowed these methods and were not being completely honest with their advertisers in the search for revenue. While I can’ t a specific company, I have to wonder if their advertisers know the methods of promotions of their videos.
Either way, I plan to examine this issue more and examine the practices of video pre-roll companies, how websites are being promoted and more importantly, what can be done to prevent this.
NB: Here is a great link on Ben Edelman’s site about Crackle being promoted via 1×1 pixels.
7 Responses to “Are video pre-roll companies being scammed out of millions?”
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(C) 2010 Pace Lattin. It is the policy of this blogger to not edit or remove any content and comments, unless it is specifically attacking a protected group or irrelevant to the conversation, such as a spam. These are the OPINIONS of the respective writers, posters, commentators. All DCMA Notices shoudl be sent to pace@pacelattin.com
Somewhat interesting read, but the overall topic is not that exciting. It could be summed up in a paragraph. I wouldn't read a follow up article on it, but thanks for writing this one.
Pace, I think you should take the time to state the facts properly and do the research: We hired Ben Edelman due to his methodology and reputation as we do other similar services. We do this to make sure we run advertising properly. As Ben told you, his company has not found one instance of an issue in 2010 due to this very diligence. Unfortunately, you've decided to spin things very differently. Lastly, as I explained to you, but, not surprisingly, you failed to report, Brightroll has been an advertiser this entire year. Please do inform Tod Sacerdoti. Did you decide to leave this fact out of the article in favor of stating Brightroll's position as "largest video advertising network in the world?" (source please). We are one of the "good guys" that do things the right way. Irresponsible journalism only exacerbates the problems in the industry.
Neal Weinberg
This is Pace's world where things are done his way. Comment subject to moderation by Pace himself of course.
Move over blogs: Shoemoney, Jonathan Volk, etc
There's a new sheriff in town.
Jack, it's my policy (read bottom of the page) as of August 1st, 2010 not to moderate comments unless they are obvious spam or attacks against people based on race, etc. It means that guys like you can still use proxy servers to hide who you are and make nasty comments!
I've worked with Neal Weinberg and TopTVBytes at each of my last two companies (both video networks). Neal is straightforward and open about his use of pop-ups/unders when needed. Neal has explained that he's never employed any pop-ups or pop-unders on campaigns that I've provided him, and I believe him. The last company who should be commenting here is Brightroll, which itself buys directly and indirectly from other video networks. Pace, if you'd like to discuss this in more detail, I'm happy to take offline.
Hey Pesach, it's good for all of us to keep a close eye on best practices but Neal is one of the good guys. Almost every website has an audience development strategy in place, usually using SEO, display, textlinks, emails, or pop-ups to drive traffic to their site. I have also worked with Neal at two different companies and he's always been forthcoming about his audience dev strategy. In fact, he put me in touch with DoubleVerify a year ago and was one of the first video publishers to change their video player to accomodate the DV code so they could self-police their quality. He also changed his whole infrustructure to accomodate The Pool Project, was one of the first publishers to comply to VAST and VPAID, and will adapt his site any time his clients need him to. These are just a few examples I can give of his efforts to accomodate his network clients as well as their agency customers.
I don't think I blamed TopTVBytes itself in fact, and did include a quote from Tremor who had nothing but good things to say.