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Pixalate, a provider of fraud protection and data intelligence, announced a monthly in-app Mobile Seller Trust Index (MSTI), with the aim of offering more clarity on how supply quality in mobile should be evaluated.
Pixalate introduced its monthly Global Seller Trust Index for display and mobile Web advertising in December 2014. The new MSTI is based on factors specific to in-app mobile ads, including legitimate inventory, fraud, transparency and location. The MSTI evaluates 125 supply-side platforms with in-app mobile inventory based on analysis of more than 5 billion impressions to determine the reputation.
“Though majority of that supply is coming from mobile apps, effectively evaluating supply quality has been difficult,” Khalid Razzaq, Pixalate’s vice president of product management, told eWEEK. “This is why Pixalate, with access to billions of mobile in-app impressions, quantified the quality of each in-app impression with our proprietary MSTI—to provide buyers with an objective assessment of supply chain.”
The top 10 sellers for the month of August include Amobee, Rubicon, Big Mobile Group, Millennial Media Exchange, OpenX, Airpush, AOL Marketplace, Google AdExchange, Nexage, and InMobi.
“Due to overt complexity, a void in transparency and the lack of necessary technology for quantifying and measuring quality, fraudsters have been able to get away with in-app mobile fraud for far too long,” Razzaq said. “Currently, media buyers have no benchmark for the quality of their supply and supply sources. MSTI is the first transparent, independent and objective rating of its kind. This will finally offer much-needed transparency to the mobile in-app advertising industry.”
Of the 125 seller-side in-app mobile ad platforms evaluated, 10 sellers own more than 80 percent of the inventory, which equals less than 7percent of sellers, according to Pixilate.
While location is becoming increasingly critical for in-app mobile advertising, the company found only 30 percent of inventory included location data and only 18 percent (or 60 percent of those with location data) provided accurate location.
More than one-third of mobile in-app fraud comes from data centers, indicating that there are hosted machines running highly customized mobile app simulators, the company said.
In addition, more than 50 percent of the in-app mobile ad inventory on exchanges did not offer device ID information.
Mobile advertising spending in the U.S. is expected to reach nearly $29 billion in 2015, according to a recent report from eMarketer, but the mobile ad industry faces severe problems as legitimate advertising inventory is decreasing and advertising fraud is on the rise.
By 2019, mobile ad spending will rise to more than $65 billion, or 72.2 percent of total digital ad spend, with next year serving as the tipping point where mobile ad spend outpaces desktop ad spending.