Pixalate’s April 2024 Ad Fraud Research on CTV Apps with the Highest Invalid Traffic (IVT) Rate on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung Smart TV App Stores
May 13 2024 - 2:59PM
Pixalate, the market-leading fraud protection, privacy, and
compliance analytics platform for Connected TV (CTV) and Mobile
Advertising, today released the April 2024 CTV Apps IVT Report for
Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Samsung Smart TV. The series
reveals which CTV apps appear to be most impacted by invalid
traffic (IVT), including ad fraud, as measured by Pixalate.
Pixalate’s data science team analyzed 6k+ downloadable apps across
all CTV platforms, along with over 1.6 billion global open
programmatic advertising impressions from April 2024, to compile
this research.The reports highlight the five most common types of
IVT that Pixalate observed across all four CTV app platforms during
the study period, which are as follows:
- Display Impression Fraud
(Sophisticated Outlier Activity*): Involves
impressions generated from the same browser or device at a
statistically significant inflated rate.
- Video Impression Fraud (Sophisticated
Outlier Activity*): Video ad impressions that are
generated from the same browser or device at a statistically
significant inflated rate.
- Masked IP (Manipulation/Falsification
of Location Related Attributes*): Involves video ad
impressions generated from the same browser or device at a
statistically significant inflated rate.
- Device ID Stuffing (Sophisticated
Outlier Activity*, User Attribute Manipulation*, False
Representation*): Activity from a device connected to the
internet via a statistically significant inflated number of
different IP Addresses.
- Data Center (Known Data-Center
Traffic*): The User’s IP has a match in the Pixalate known
Datacenter list.
*Note: Parenthetical information denotes IVT detection method(s)
per Media Rating Council (MRC) Invalid Traffic Guidelines.
Pixalate excluded spoofing from this report, as spoofing
requires different tactics to mitigate it (e.g., blocking an app
highly impacted by spoofing could lead to blocking apps with real
traffic attractive to buyers). See our CTV App Spoofing
series for a list of apps most impacted by the spoofing IVT type.
Learn more about Pixalate’s reported IVT types in our Knowledge
Base.
Amazon Fire TV Apps With the Highest Rates of IVT -
April 20241. Cooking Channel GO (28%)2. Cube Puzzle
(24%)3. British Movies & TV by Fawesome (21%)4. FXNOW: Watch TV
Live & On Demand (19%)5. NV.TV (17%)
Roku Apps With the Highest Rates of IVT - April
2024 1. WIBW News (13%)2. USA Network (13%)3. Extreme
Sports (12%)4. FOX13 Memphis Now (12%)5. WatchFreeHorrorFlix
(12%)
Apple TV Apps With the Highest Rates of IVT - April
2024 1. OXYGEN (24%)2. FXNOW: Movies, Shows & Live TV
(14%)3. AMC: Stream TV Shows & Movies (9%)4. Denver 7+ Colorado
News (9%)5. Scripps News (8%)
Samsung Smart TV Apps With the Highest Rates of IVT -
April 2024 1. Weather4us (11%)2. FXNOW (6%)3. Fox News
(6%)4. BET+ (6%)5. UltraFlix (5%)
Download the full lists to see the top 10 CTV apps on each
platform with the highest levels of IVT, as measured by Pixalate,
from April 2024:
- Roku apps with the highest IVT rates
- Amazon Fire TV apps with the highest IVT rates
- Apple TV apps with the highest IVT rates
- Samsung Smart TV apps with the highest IVT rates
Buyers or ad platforms can use these lists to review the traffic
on each platform they have transacted on and dive deeper into the
levels and types of IVT they may have seen. Learn more about the
best overall CTV apps for open programmatic advertising in our
Publisher Trust Index.
About PixalatePixalate is a global platform for
privacy compliance, ad fraud prevention, and data intelligence in
the digital ad supply chain. Founded in 2012, Pixalate’s platform
is trusted by regulators, data researchers, advertisers,
publishers, ad tech platforms, and financial analysts across the
Connected TV (CTV), mobile app, and website ecosystems. Pixalate is
MRC-accredited for the detection and filtration of Sophisticated
Invalid Traffic (SIVT). www.pixalate.com
DisclaimerThe content of this post, and the CTV
Apps with the Highest IVT Reports, reflect Pixalate's opinions with
respect to factors that Pixalate believes can be useful to the
digital media industry. Pixalate’s opinions are just that,
opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees;
and neither this post nor the Reports are intended to impugn the
standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but instead,
to report findings and apparent trends in the time period studied.
Pixalate is sharing this data not to impugn the standing or
reputation of any entity, person or app, but, instead, to report
findings and trends pertaining to programmatic advertising activity
in the time period studied. Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended
to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and
ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal
proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for
advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid
Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain
ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not
represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in
measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed
invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots,
etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”
Nina Talcott
Pixalate Inc.
ntalcott@pixalate.com