May 17. 2026
NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING
This piece includes material from my book, "Inside The Black Box"
For over a decade, annoying dickheads like me have been writing, screaming, and holding our breath about how marketers are being screwed blind by adtech con artists. It hasn't done an ounce of good.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal had a major piece entitled 'Efforts to Weed Out Fake Users for Online Advertisers Fall Short.' The piece was focused on something I've written about a lot - how the reports marketers get about their online campaigns are alarmingly unreliable.
Let's start at the beginning.
First let's take a look at the scope of fraud in online advertising. The Journal published this chart, from Juniper Research, which estimated online ad fraud in 2025 at over $100 billion.
You would think being screwed out of more than $100 billion in one year would cause some kind of angst in the ad community. Not a bit. We have normalized stupidity and incompetence to such an extent that all you hear are crickets.
Next, the Journal reported on a study by Adalytics that indicates the following:
- "The top three companies that advertisers pay to detect and filter out bots—DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Human Security—regularly miss nonhuman traffic.”
- "The report...found tens of millions of instances over seven years in which ads for brands including Hershey’s, Tyson Foods, T-Mobile, Diageo, the U.S. Postal Service and the Journal were served to bots across thousands of websites.”
- "This occurred even in cases when bots identified themselves as such" Let me emphasize this. Some bots are harmless, identify themselves as such, and just perform non-detrimental tasks. Even when non-malign bots identified themselves as bots the so-called 'fraud detection' companies couldn't find them. Laura Edelson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University and former Justice Department technologist said, 'It’s like, can you tell the difference between a person and a person-shaped sock puppet that is holding up a sign saying, ‘I am a sock puppet’?'
- "DoubleVerify missed 21% of the documented bot visits and allowed ads to be served to them, according to (one) publisher’s analysis...In some cases, DoubleVerify’s software identified a bot but still let a brand buy an ad for that audience, the analysis showed." That's worth emphasizing - they found bots but still treated them as humans and the advertisers got charged. How's that for incompetence?
- "Fighting fraud by bad actors—which don’t flag themselves as bots—is even harder." If these clowns can't identify a bot that turns itself in and announces it's a bot, how in the f-ing world are you supposed to believe it can find bad bots that are trying to hide?
Of course, in an effort intimidate critics, Double Verify is suing Adalytics.
Here's the bottom line.
You have media people buying advertising from the programmatic fraud factory. They have no idea what they're buying, who they are buying from, what they are getting, or what they are paying. It's a black box.
Then to justify their irresponsibility they hire validation clowns who can't find their ass with two hands and a flashlight. But they provide the media people with lovely reports that 'certify' their brilliant work.
Then the media people take these reports to their bosses and say, "Look how smart I am."
According to Check My Ads Institute, who have been scrutinizing online advertising for years, there is "alarming evidence that adtech companies are misleading government entities and taxpayers, charities, and other businesses about their ability to detect and prevent fraudulent ad placements."
Government entities that have been screwed by the "real time bot detection" of the 'fraud detection' companies include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the U.S. Census Bureau (Census), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the United States Postal Service (USPS).
Double Verify is now facing multiple lawsuits, primarily a class action alleging that it misled investors about the effectiveness of its ad fraud detection.
In a letter to the the head of the FTC, Sen. Mark Warner wrote, "Research indicates that certain ad verification companies are making apparently false and misleading claims about the capability of their products…"
Adtech companies misleading people? Gedattahere!
