TAG Plans To Share Database of Known Fraudulent Domains With Ad Industry Stakeholders

The Trustworthy Accountability Group, the advertising industry's initiative to improve the digital ecosystem, said it plans to create, maintain and share its database of domains that have been identified as known sources of fraudulent bot traffic for digital ads. The TAG fraud threat list program was unveiled Monday at an Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in New York by Mike Zaneis, interim CEO of TAG, and Jim Norton, global head of media sales at AOL, which Verizon Tuesday agreed to buy. The technical proposal for the fraud threat list program will be at tagtoday.net and comments from ad industry stakeholders will be accepted for 30 days before the program is finalized. The pilot phase of the program battling the $6.3 billion issue of fraudulent ad traffic has been implemented, and broader deployment of the final program is expected in Q3, said TAG. The program lets ad companies “take power back from the criminals who are undermining our industry,” Zaneis said. “By gathering and sharing known sources of fraudulent impressions across the digital advertising ecosystem, TAG will give companies the information they need to find and remove non-human traffic from their inventory.” The list will be compiled using information from participating companies with “specific insight on domains that are driving significant fraudulent ad traffic to the ad industry” such as AOL and Yahoo, and will be available to advertising networks, publishers and technology providers, said TAG.