White Bullet’s Q4 2018 report shows brands continue to play a major role in funding digital IP infringement through ad misplacement. White Bullet found that 40% of all ads on IP infringing websites in Q4 2018 were from branded campaigns, with 10% of all ads coming from major brands.
Project Brand Integrity – a joint initiative between White Bullet and TAG launched in February 2019 – looks to address the levels of major branded advertising appearing on IP infringing websites in Europe by advising advertisers about their presence on high risk pirate websites. Raising awareness by alerting brands at risk is important in the European market as major brands are appearing on high risk websites in significant volume, making up 10% of all ads found. Europe is second only to South America (13% of all ads) in prevalence of major branded ads.
Sponsored content boxes also continue to represent a considerable proportion of the advertising found, making up 30% of all ads in Q4. Sponsored content boxes are advertising campaigns consisting of native advertising placed within content boxes and include multiple advertorials in a single inventory slot. The stakeholders within the digital advertising industry need to raise awareness of the extent to which these native networks increasingly fund digital IP infringement.
Adult and Fraud & Malware campaigns – known as high risk campaigns - are at comparable levels to Q3 2018, comprising 25% of all ads. Interestingly this figure is down from 43% in Q1 2017 , demonstrating that IP infringing operators have been able to shift from lower-paying high risk ad campaigns to more branded and sponsored content campaigns, which often pay more.
This pivot to higher paying advertising is quite likely due to an increase in use of blocklist evasion techniques. These dynamic techniques, such as domain hopping and mirroring, enable IP infringing operators to receive higher paying advertising by moving their operations from domains on static blocklists to clean domains that are not known to the ad industry.
info@white-bullet.com