Malvertising’s impact on marketers revenue & sub churn — Matt Gillis // Clean.io

Quotes

• “But when the world kind of took a pause last March, it was obviously detrimental to publishers, right? So big advertisers took a pause…”

• “So prices actually went down, which created a pretty good opening for bad actors to creep in and buy a whole bunch. And so we saw pretty big surges in the early days of COVID of malicious activity. And it didn't last forever.”

• “The reality is there probably weren't enough good guys to pick up the slack. And I think traffic surged, right? So with everybody sitting at home and on their machines, there was a whole bunch more traffic that wouldn't have normally been there. I think to understand it truly, you have to put your performance marketer hat on...”

• “Well, on March 10th, when the world kind of hit pause and all these big brands that were spending money hit pause, it created a big opportunity for bad actors to buy inventory on sites that probably would have either been sold out or they would have been priced out where they couldn't make the arbitrage.”

• “They may target your wireless carrier and create a page that looks like T-Mobile, or it looks like sprint or Verizon. They also use brands like credit cards.”

• “Let's just say it was like capture an email address and complete the survey and they get paid five bucks or 10 bucks, whatever the bounty is from the affiliate for driving that you don't have to do many of them to figure out that the arbitrage on that is pretty rich. So I think it's a lot of money at stake.”

• “It's one of those things that it's not the five alarm fire constantly, if it is they're going to get caught. So their whole goal is to fly under the radar.”

• “One of the other unique things is that we actually let the bad actor buy most other softwares that we're competing with in this industry, they prevent them from buying. One of the other unique things is that we actually let the bad actor by most other softwares that we're competing with in this industry, they prevent them from buying.”

• “And so when we see an ad that loads and then starts to call top dot redirect, you're like, Hm, that's probably not a good one. So we probably should block the JavaScript from executing. It's as simple as that.”