Confiant, the Cybersecurity industry leader for ad tech, released its 2023 Malvertising & Ad Quality index (MAQ) industry benchmark report based on 2022 annualized data. The MAQ is Confiant’s study of the current state of creative ad quality and ad security in the marketplace.
Confiant releases 2023 Malvertising & Ad Quality index (MAQ) industry benchmark report based on 2022 annualized data
To compile the research contained in this report, Confiant analyzed a normalized sample of more than 850 billion advertising impressions monitored from January 1 to December 31, 2022, across tens of thousands of premium websites and apps from top publishers like Paramount, Gannett, Nexstar, and CafeMedia. The MAQ leverages Confiant’s position as the vendor of choice for ad security, quality, and privacy monitoring, in order to provide a comprehensive view into the creative issues facing the industry.
The report identifies that one in every 140 programmatic ads in 2022 had serious security or quality violations, which is a significant increase over both 2020 and 2021. The quality violation rate alone, increased 104% since 2020 worldwide. Heavy Ads and Misleading Claims drove the quality violation rate highest in Japan, Canada, and Great Britain.
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The MAQ reports that overall ad security violations nearly doubled in 2022, being the highest since 2019, and represented a three year high point in malvertising attacks. Viewed geographically, Canada had the highest rate of security issues, followed by France, while security rates moderated in other European markets.
“During 2022 we measured the highest rate of malicious attacks via digital ads in the last three years. Even as the industry has continued to improve its protections, our MAQ Benchmarks show the ad security issues from threat actors and the ad quality issues from the lack of transparent and accurate buy-side meta data is making life worse for publishers and their users,” said Louis-David Mangin, CEO and Co-Founder of Confiant, Inc. “These threat actors are organized criminals and the financial incentives far outweigh the risks. I wish advertisers would recognize how crucial it is for every member of the ecosystem to put the user first. We appreciate our clients who have made the investment in using our technology and also in their internal processes to create control within their piece of the ad tech infrastructure,” concluded Mangin.
When grouped by browser family across all available operating systems, Microsoft’s Edge users were the most impacted by security issues, with a rate three times worse than Google Chrome users. Mozilla’s Firefox users followed closely behind Edge with the second highest security violation rate.
Confiant allows publishers to classify creatives across 100+ different industry categories, including common business verticals and sensitive topics such as Gambling, Pharmaceutical Drugs, and Alcoholic Beverages, which respectively held the top three most blocked ad categories by publishers throughout 2022, collectively representing well over 50% of all blocks. Blocks for Cryptocurrency ads declined precipitously in the second half, after ranking as the 3rd most blocked category by publishers in the first half of the year.
Confiant tracked impressions from over 100 SSPs and demand sources. However, the majority of global impressions originated from 14 providers. Those top fourteen SSPs are monitored for SSP rankings, including: Google, Magnite, OpenX, Xandr, Yahoo, Index Exchange, Pubmatic, GumGum, Sonobi, TripleLift, Sharethrough, Media.net, 33Across, and Sovrn. The top four SSPs had high rates of ads with Misleading Claims. For the worst-performer of the group, 1 in every 330 impressions was a misleading claim, which was far more than the others. The MAQ provides comparison charts of security violation rates by SSP, their maximum daily percentage of security violations, and their incident response times.
SOURCE: PR Newswire