Ad revenue received by websites infringing intellectual property exceeds hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
A significant portion of this revenue comes from the ad budgets of reputable brands. White Bullet found that 70 of the top 100 global advertisers had an advertising presence on IP infringing websites in 2017.The reason why so many reputable brands are appearing on IP infringing websites is not rooted in an unwillingness to tackle the issue. Rather, it is rooted in three causes: the complex and non-transparent nature of digital advertising, the ability of IP infringing websites to avoid detection, and a lack of dynamic ad safety tools available to brands.The millions of digital advertising transactions that happen every day make the ecosystem extremely complex and non-transparent. With so many advertising companies involved in the supply chain for each impression, it is incredibly difficult to figure out who is responsible for placing ads on high risk publishers.This complexity and inability to trace or fully understand the supply chains of ads means reputable brands have often served millions of impressions to IP infringing websites before they are even aware of the issue or how to fix it. By that time brand reputational damage has already occurred and the pirates have their money.Combine this complexity with the dynamic ability of pirate domains to circumvent law enforcement efforts to demonetize them and it is easy to see why so many reputable brands have an advertising presence on IP infringing websites.When a website becomes notorious for IP infringement, ad industry bodies, rights holders, and law enforcement officials will often lead efforts to blocklist them in an attempt to cut off their ad revenue.To avoid this, pirate websites engage in many blocklist evasion techniques, such as domain hopping.Once an IP infringing website gains a wide enough audience and becomes well known to rights holders and law enforcement agencies, the website will hop to a new, clean domain name that is certain to not be included on any static blocklists.Ad safety tools – such as static blocklists – lack the dynamism and intelligence to keep up with evasion techniques used by IP infringing domains. This lack of dynamism results in premium branded advertising placed by renowned ad exchanges being served to IP infringing domains.White Bullet’s IPI Risk Profiling solutions – powered by White Bullet’s IPI Index™ - tackle the dynamism of the pirate domain ecosystem, giving brands and advertising companies the ability to verify domains for IP infringement risk before bidding.White Bullet’s IPI Index™ is an ever-expanding repository of websites, each assessed and scored for IP infringement risk daily. The IPI Index™ identifies websites involved in domain hopping and other evasion techniques through machine learning, meaning it can prevent your ad budget finding its way into the hand of pirates no matter how sophisticated they are in avoiding detection.White Bullet’s IPI Brand Monitoring solutions can also pinpoint the non-compliant advertising partners responsible for misplacing your branded advertising.Websites that have been certified as IP infringing by the IPI Index™ are tracked for advertising, alerting you if we find your branded advertising on high risk IP infringing websites. White Bullet provides you with screenshots and all the pertinent information about the advertising companies involved in the misplacement of the ad. This gives you the transparency to act against the advertising companies responsible for putting your brand’s reputation at risk.Contact us today to find out how you can integrate White Bullet IPI Risk Profiling and Brand Monitoring solutions into your digital marketing operations.