How Much Of Your Audience Is Fake

Amram is at Heineken USA now, where the annual ad budget is in the $150 million range.
Late that year he and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.  
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Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it.
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An even more cost-effective technique—and as a rule of thumb, fake is always cheaper—is an ad bot, malware that surreptitiously takes over someone else’s computer and creates a virtual browser. This virtual browser, invisible to the computer’s owner, visits websites, scrolls through pages, and clicks links. No one is viewing the pages, of course; it’s just the malware. But unless the bot is detected, it’s counted as a view by traffic-measuring services. A botnet, with thousands of hijacked computers working in concert, can create a massive “audience” very quickly.
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On LinkedIn there’s a forum called “Buying & Selling TRAFFIC,” where 1,000 “visitors” can be had for $1. Legit traffic is a lot more expensive. Taboola, for example, charges publishers from 20¢ to 90¢ per visitor for video content, targeted to a U.S. audience on desktops only. A publisher like Bonnier can sell a video ad for 1¢ to 1.2¢ per view in a programmatic auction, which is how the company sold most ads on its video sites. If Bonnier had gone with Taboola, it might be losing 19¢ per view or more.
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(Bloomberg.com, which like Bloomberg Businessweek is owned by Bloomberg LP, reported 24.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in August, according to ComScore. The site purchases between 1 percent and 2 percent of its traffic from Taboola and Outbrain.
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/