Breakdown of the DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024 report ↗ and why HaltClick remains the only way to stop this nightmare.
Imagine this: you launch an advertising campaign with a budget of several million rubles, carefully fine-tune your targeting, create creatives backed by weeks of work from talented designers and copywriters, and eagerly await the first results — only to receive mountains of meaningless clicks, zero conversions, and a report with numbers that look convincing exactly until you try to match them against actual sales. Sound familiar? If not, you are either just starting out in digital advertising, or you have already lost so much money that you stopped paying attention. And believe me, the latter is a far more likely scenario.
The digital advertising market in 2024 is a battlefield where the interests of hundreds of thousands of advertisers and billions of dollars collide every second, and where fraudsters have mastered technologies that five years ago we only read about in science fiction. The DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024 report, based on the analysis of more than a trillion impressions from over 2,000 brands across 100 markets, paints a frightening picture: we are standing on the threshold of a new era of digital fraud, and the speed at which schemes for deceiving advertisers are developing exceeds all conceivable forecasts.
And if you still believe that «well, we have Google and Yandex, they filter everything themselves» — prepare for a rude awakening. The protection offered by advertising platforms is only the tip of the iceberg, and it does not save you from the worst: organized, technologically equipped click fraud and bots that daily siphon billions of dollars from advertising budgets around the world.
§1 THE ERA OF THE ARTIFICIAL IDIOT: HOW AI TURNED FRAUD INTO AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE
When the world first encountered generative artificial intelligence en masse in late 2022, many saw it solely as a tool for creativity. Writing texts, drawing pictures, creating videos — it seemed that humanity had received a universal assistant that would make our lives easier and more interesting. But, as often happens, the shadow turned out to be longer than the light.
54% of marketers believe that generative AI has a significant negative impact on the quality of media advertising.
And this is not just paranoia. It is a harsh reality confirmed by data.
How fraudsters use AI to destroy your budget
The DoubleVerify report reveals mechanisms that previously could only be seen in Hollywood hacker movies. Today they are everyday reality.
Generating fake users
AI makes it possible to create thousands, hundreds of thousands of «digital doubles» — software entities that imitate real users with frightening accuracy. They have unique digital fingerprints, change behavioral patterns, «browse» sites the way real people do, and click on ads at such speed and frequency that distinguishing them from a real audience becomes almost impossible.
Scaling fraudulent schemes
Previously, creating a new fraud scheme required weeks of programmer work. Today AI generates new variants in a matter of hours. In 2023, the average bot fraud scheme spawned 269% more variants than a year earlier. This is an exponential explosion.
Creating the illusion of legitimacy
AI easily generates content for disposable sites and writes hundreds of fake reviews. You buy advertising in an app with 50,000 installs. In reality, it is a shell created in one evening with the help of AI, and all those installs are bots that will click your ads until the budget runs out.
The other side of the coin: AI as a weapon of defense
But, as they say, fight fire with fire. DoubleVerify actively uses AI to combat fraud — and it is paying off. Every day, the DV Universal Content Intelligence system analyzes more than 1.3 billion minutes of video content and 350 million social media posts. Machine learning processes colossal volumes of data in real time, identifying patterns that would be invisible to the human eye.
The result: the overall post-bid fraud rate for DoubleVerify clients remains extremely low — just 1.1%. This is an impressive figure, especially against the backdrop that unprotected advertisers around the world face fraud rates of up to 17%.
But here is the catch: this figure only reflects the effectiveness of pre-bid protection, meaning filtering before the impression is even purchased. Without such protection, your budget is an open ATM for fraudsters.
§2 ATTENTION IS THE NEW CURRENCY BEING STOLEN FROM YOU
Remember the days when the only metrics of advertising success were impressions and clicks? Welcome to 2024 — the era of attention. And here we face yet another unpleasant surprise.
Attention as a metric: why clicks no longer matter
According to the DoubleVerify report, 47% of media buyers plan to use attention metrics on most of their purchases in 2024. And this is no accident — advertisers have finally realized that a click is merely a mechanical action that says nothing about the user's real interest.
DV Authentic Attention analyzes more than 50 data points per impression, dividing attention into two critical components:
Exposure
How intensely and prominently the ad was displayed (visible time, screen share, audio, etc.)
Engagement
User actions: touches, screen orientation changes, video playback controls
And here lies a fundamental problem: if a bot «watches» your ad, all these metrics are nothing more than fake. A bot can «click» a thousand times, but it will never show real attention. That is why campaigns optimized for attention show 50% greater growth in brand metrics compared to campaigns optimized for visibility.
Seasonality and attention: when noise kills results
The DoubleVerify report revealed a curious pattern: attention to advertising drops during periods of information overload. In the fourth quarter, when the world goes crazy with pre-holiday hustle, attention declines — with the exception of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, when consumers purposefully seek out deals.
What does this mean for advertisers? That even in «hot» seasons, most of your budget is wasted — on impressions no one sees and clicks no one makes. And the better bots get at imitating human behavior, the harder it becomes to distinguish real interest from artificial noise.
§3 MADE FOR ADVERTISING: SITES THAT EXIST ONLY TO STEAL YOUR MONEY
If you thought the problem was only bots — you are mistaken. There is an entire ecosystem of sites created solely for displaying ads. They are called MFA — Made for Advertising. And they are a true plague of modern digital marketing.
What MFA is and why it is dangerous
MFA sites are not necessarily fraud in the classic sense. They often attract real people. But their business model is built on maximizing the number of ad impressions while maintaining minimal content quality.
Typical characteristics of MFA sites:
High ad-to-content ratio — the page may contain more ad blocks than useful information
Constant ad refreshing — to extract maximum revenue from a single visitor
Dependence on paid traffic — almost no organic traffic
Infinite scrolling — content is designed to keep the user from leaving the page
Duplicated content — the same text is copied across dozens of sites
And the worst news: the volume of MFA impressions grew by 19% year over year. The number of low-tier MFA sites (hybrid) increased by 73% in 2023.
Extreme signs
-25% below attention baseline
Moderate signs
-10% below attention baseline
Mixed content
-1% below attention baseline
MFA vs. ordinary content: shocking numbers
- MFA sites show 7% less attention on display ads and 28% less on video
- Viewability time on MFA sites averages 9 seconds versus 18 seconds on ordinary sites
- Video players on MFA sites are significantly smaller, reducing screen share
Meanwhile, what is especially insidious is that viewability metrics on MFA sites are at benchmark level — they are specifically created to look attractive to programmatic buyers. So you pay for «quality» impressions and get a hollow shell that produces no real result.
§4 RETAIL MEDIA: A NEW GOLD MINE OR A NEW HEADACHE?
Retail Media Networks (RMN) are one of the fastest-growing segments of digital advertising. According to forecasts, in 2024 RMN will account for one-fifth of global digital ad spend. And this is a huge opportunity... and a huge problem.
Two worlds of RMN: O&O and Audience Extension
RMN offers two types of inventory:
Owned & Operated (O&O)
Advertising on the retailer's own sites and apps (for example, on a product page in an online store).
- ↓ Viewability: 36% (below benchmark)
- ↑ Engagement: 183% above baseline
- ↓ Fraud: 0.7% (below benchmark)
Audience Extension
Advertising outside the retailer's properties, using its shopper data.
- ↑ Viewability: 73% (higher than O&O)
- ↓ Engagement: Lower than O&O
- ↓ Fraud: 0.9% (below benchmark)
The RMN paradox: high engagement with low viewability
The DoubleVerify report shows that brand suitability and fraud on RMN are below benchmark — that is good. But viewability is 8% below benchmark — and that is expected, because e-commerce platforms are built for purchases, not for viewing ads. On O&O inventory, viewability is only 36% — almost two-thirds of impressions are seen by no one!
However, there is good news: engagement on O&O inventory is 183% above DoubleVerify's baseline. Because people who are already on a product page are far more likely to buy.
Seasonal quality decline in RMN
In the fourth quarter, when demand for retail advertising skyrockets, inventory quality drops: brand suitability violations rose 37%, fraud violations increased 7%, and viewability hit its lowest point in November.
This means that during the most critical sales period of the year, you risk losing a significant portion of your budget on low-quality inventory — unless you have reliable protection.
§5 WHY STANDARD TOOLS ARE NOT ENOUGH
You may ask: «But I have protection from Google and Yandex! Why do I need anything else?»
My answer: the standard tools of advertising platforms are reactive protection. They react to events that have already happened, analyze budgets that have already been spent, and only then block suspicious sources. By the time Google or Yandex notice an anomaly, a significant portion of your budget has already vanished.
Moreover, advertising platforms are not interested in overly aggressive filtering — after all, their revenue directly depends on the volume of advertising budgets spent. The more you spend, the more they earn. The conflict of interest is obvious.
§6 NUMBERS THAT LEAVE NO CHOICE
Let's gather all the numbers from the DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024 report in one place.
TIME TO ACT
We live in an era when digital fraud has become a high-tech business with a turnover of tens of billions of dollars. Fraudsters use AI, machine learning, and generative content just as actively as legitimate advertisers. And they are becoming more sophisticated every day.
The DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024 report is not just another study. It is an alarm signal for everyone who spends money on digital advertising. It is proof that:
- Fraud is not «somewhere out there,» it is here and now
- AI has made fraud accessible and scalable
- Standard protection tools are insufficient
- Ad quality directly impacts business results
HaltClick is not just a protection service. It is an investment in the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. It is insurance that your budget will not end up in the pockets of fraudsters, but will bring real customers.
Don't wait for the next fraud attack to empty your ad budget. Don't hope for «maybe it will pass.» In a world where AI generates thousands of new fraudulent schemes every day, hope is the worst strategy.
Connect HaltClick today.
Protect your money.
Regain control of your advertising budget.
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The article was prepared based on the DoubleVerify Global Insights 2024 report and HaltClick data. All figures and statistics are from the indicated sources.