The great online advertising swindle

Conmen and fraudsters thrive in confusion. And few places are more confusing and opaque than the jargon-ridden world of online advertising. Which is odd really, since the entire social media edifice – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat – depends on it. 2017 was the year of the tech-lash, when people and politicians started to push back against tech-led disruption. But there’s potentially a far more significant threat looming for the tech giants: ad fraud.

On one level, online advertising is very simple: you get shown endless adverts as you bounce your way around the net, and an advertiser pays whenever someone either looks at, or – the holy grail! – clicks on one of the damn things. Every year tens of billions of pounds are spent in this war for your attention, and some of the world’s finest minds are engaged. But on another level it’s not simple at all. There are ‘demand side’ platforms that decide which online ad space to buy and for how much (mostly done via some complicated big data analysis); and ‘supply side’ platforms which sell the space to them.