Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

That said, the assumption is that advertisers are the victims here. However, in reality ad spending is driven by huge multinational, bureaucratic and dysfunctional companies. For many of these companies the goal is simply to spend the allocated budgets, and forget about sanity and KPI-driven processes. In that sense advertisers and fraudsters are willing accomplices.

>>Not really. Not having fraud would be a huge competitive advantage, so of course ad companies are investing huge resources into fraud prevention.

What if they decide to have just enough fraud? Make money but advertisers see it as cost of doing business

You miss my point. Ad networks and ad tech companies aren't aiding and abetting fraud. For them it is a cost center. Advertisers are the ones aiding and abetting fraud.

Not having fraud is only an advantage if it can be proven definitely enough that you don't have any (which is impossible). Everyone claims they're combating fraud, it doesn't really mean anything and it's already priced in to the market.

That's a little aggressive but yes, many of the major networks have a lot of fraudulent traffic that they do know about but yet do not do all they can to prevent.

This is because many of these companies are paid by volume and percentage of media spend so they are incentivized to increase traffic, not limit it.

tech companies are going the way of banks