Ad Fraud Science with Augustine Fou

Advertising fraud continues to plague the Internet. We do not know the scope and scale of that fraud. How many ads on the Internet are viewed by bots? Estimations range from 2% to 99%.

Advertisers are slowly becoming more educated about fraud, thanks in part to Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is a full-time advertising fraud researcher. He looks at data sets of billions of ad impressions to figure out how fraud works and help victims of ad fraud make their case.

Last year, Dr. Fou came on the show to give an overview of his perspective on the world of ad fraud. Today, we dive into the importance of Twitter in ad fraud schemes. We also talk about the severity of fraud on mobile apps. If you downloaded a flashlight app, or an alarm clock app, or a keyboard, that app could be displaying hidden ads that never actually show up.

Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about getting into a new job: brought to you by Indeed Prime.

If you like this episode, we have done other shows about advertising fraud. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and Android to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by looking at the recommendations in the app.

The mobile apps are open sourced at github.com/softwareengineeringdaily. If you are looking for an open source project to hack on, we would love to get your help! The Software Engineering Daily open source community is building a new way to consume software engineering content. We have the Android app, the iOS app, a recommendation system, and a web frontend. If you are interested in contributing, check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily–or send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com