Are Video Pre-Roll Companies Being Scammed Out of Millions?
Invisible players, hidden frames and video ads nobody could see. Ben Edelman documented it in 2010. The industry called it minor.
Video was the premium inventory of 2010, priced like television and measured like a slot machine. The question in this headline was whether anyone was actually watching.
What the research showed
Ben Edelman had been documenting the problem for years. In 2007 he showed spyware generating fake traffic at video sites. In January 2009 he estimated that at least 35% of Yahoo's Right Media inventory had deceptive characteristics. In October 2009 he found sites loading dozens of ads inside hidden, zero-size frames, with the traffic touching Right Media, Burst, ValueClick, Zedo, Rubicon and others. One buyer quoted at the time called it a minor issue.
The closest match to this headline came in April 2010: Edelman's report on Sony's Crackle. On spyware-infected test machines, Crackle's video pages were loaded inside hidden one-pixel frames and oversized windows, so advertisers paid for video ads nobody could see. Right Media was upstream in every example he logged. He also warned that hidden loads like these could inflate audience measurement.
How it aged
The industry eventually gave the scam a name. In 2011 TubeMogul found about 400 of roughly 7,000 sites running "fake pre-roll," autoplay video stuffed into banner slots, at more than 3.3 million impressions a day, and built a blocker for it. In 2012 it publicly called out a competitor. Video-in-banner fraud became an industry staple that trade press was still writing about in 2018.
Nobody published a clean dollar figure for 2010, so "millions" stays a question. The mechanism does not. The premium was being charged for attention that did not exist, and the people selling it were also the people measuring it.
This page rebuilds an August 2010 IndustryPace post, cited by Ben Edelman, whose original text is not available. Facts come from Edelman's published research (2007 to 2010), ClickZ, Tubefilter and Digiday. No verified 2010 loss figure was found. The author ran an ad network in this period.