Advertisers Scammed By Invisible Impressions

There are sites out there that may be selling you ads that consumers aren't seeing. We're not talking about just a lack of traffic to the pages they appear on. There is a lack of traffic because the pages are simply invisible to viewers, making them essentially worthless.

A report from the
So how is an advertiser to know who to trust? One solution mentioned in the report is to buy ads based on attaining a certain number of clicks as well as impressions. In such a scenario, a site would have no benefit to pull off such a scam. Another possible solution is to be more directly involved with who you are advertising with.

"Advertisers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get," says Steel. "Over the past, year, an increasing number of scams have sought to take advantage of that pricing system as advertisers have started buying more of their online ads via middlemen called ad networks, instead of directly from the Web sites themselves. These networks sell ad space at cheap rates across thousands of sites, and they don't always weed out illegitimate players."