DoubleVerify says public domain apps used for CTV ad fraud – TechCrunch:
The team at DoubleVerify, a company that helps advertisers eliminate fraud and ensure brand safety, said that it's recently identified a new tactic used by ad fraudsters seeking to make money on internet-connected TVs.
Senior Vice President of Product Management Roy Rosenfeld said that it's harder for those fraudsters to create a legitimate-looking TV app — at least compared to the web and mobile, where "you can just put up a site [or app] to generate content." For a connected TV app, you need lots of video, which can be costly and time-consuming to produce.
"What these guys have started to do is take old content that's in the public domain and package that in fancy-looking CTV apps that they submit to the platform," Rosenfeld said. "But at the end of the day, no one is really watching the old westerns or anything like that. This is just a vehicle to get into the app stores."
As noted in a new report from the company (which will soon be available online), DoubleVerify said it has identified more than 1,300 fraudulent CTV apps in the past 18 months, with more than half of that coming in 2020.
CTV - A generic term for a Connected TeleVision(TV)
[Ed Note - Updated to remove a stray quote and add a definition for CTV]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by progo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:15PM (3 children)
What the hell is a CTV app?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Tuesday August 11 2020, @02:17PM
I don't know and the summary is a mess. Sounds like people write throw away apps to push ads and public domain content to smart tvs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:29PM
An app for watching CTV [www.ctv.ca], obviously. /s
That and links related to CTV are all that come up when I Google the term. Add "fake" and the results are news stories about fake contact tracing and fake Coronavirus apps.
The description offered by the short TFA,
has zero detail, so is basically useless.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:36PM
It looks to me like it's a term that DoubleVerify or someone in their small business circle has coined.