Scope3: A third of web domains feature ‘problematic’ ad placements

The amount of advertising spend wasted on ineffective placements extends beyond spammy made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, according to new research from carbon emissions startup Scope3.

The company in April conducted research on ads that render outside of consumer view or refresh automatically when out of view using a representative set of 13,800 domains. The research investigated roughly 208,000 unique placements. 

It found that at least a third (33%) of the domains analyzed contained “problematic placements,” which it defines as those that have a refresh rate below 15 seconds or that render out of view.

Of the domains studied, 68% were found to be auto-refreshing ads, of which nearly half (48%) refreshed while out of the consumer’s view. More than a third (36.5%) refreshed every 30 seconds, while 14.7% were found to refresh every 10 seconds or less. 

Scope3 said sub-5 second refresh rates typically indicate placements that exist purely to maximize revenue with no regard for the consumer experience.

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The vast majority (90%) of these placements were discovered outside of MFA or high-emissions properties, the company said, suggesting that the volume of waste in the advertising ecosystem is much greater than previously estimated.

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MFA websites have garnered a lot of attention in the past year after the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published a blockbuster report in June 2023 stating that the spam-riddled sites comprised 15% of total open web programmatic ad spend, amounting to billions of dollars in waste.

But issues within the supply chain are not only occurring at the domain-level, which is largely how advertisers make brand safety decisions. Peeking beneath the hood, each ad placement on a web page, app or platformis assigned a different identifier in a different ad network or SSP, making it difficult to understand the behaviors of specific ad slots.

This has enabled shady tactics — such as loading ads out of view — to slip under the radar for many years, according to Scope3 cofounder and CEO Brian O’Kelley. He told Campaign US he first started noticing such issues around 2015 while he was running AppNexus, the ad tech firm now called Xandr and operated by Microsoft.

“There were so many shenanigans, so many ways that people were driving traffic — whether it was blatant fraud or funky subdomains or social referral codes — the list was so long. We call it MFA now, but this is not new,” he said. 

Publishers who adopt these bad practices are in the mid-market and tend to struggle to retain audiences and drive revenue; top-tier publishers care about page load speed and viewability, O’Kelley said.

Bad ad placements aren’t just a waste of ad spend, but they also contribute to high carbon emissions. Scope3 estimates that 184,400 MT of CO2 emissions are wasted on “problematic placements” every year in the U.S. programmatic display market.

“Part of my motivation for starting Scope3 was, it’s not just the money that was wasted on this, [it’s also] the amount of emissions being wasted on all this baloney,” said O’Kelley. “That's what’s destroying the open internet is all the shenanigans.”

Off the back of the research, Scope3 has built a product called GMP+ which can detect and block so-called “problematic placements” from media plans. Supply-side platform Sharethrough has adopted the product.

But O’Kelley hopes that the company’s research will spark wider industry change beyond its own clients. 

“We have this built into our products, but there's nothing stopping you from going and doing it on your own. We’ve provided the formula for how to replicate our results,” he said. “I think if we want to solve problems, we need to stop being proprietary about it, and start being collaborative about how we think about these [things].”

The ad tech expert is hoping that by defining what unacceptable placements look like, the industry will eventually be able to demonetize them. 

He believes establishing standards is a more effective route than naming and shaming bad actors.

“I really wanted to do something more fundamental, which is, can we have a transparent, open conversation with open datasets and open criteria about what's okay and what's not okay?” he said. 

“If silently, everyone starts turning off these bad actors, do we need that kind of frenetic energy of, every day, there’s a crisis? I'm just worried it’s going to devalue the entire programmatic ecosystem,” he added.