- Only 43.3% of global programmatic advertising investment in Q1 2026 delivered fraud-free, measurable, viewable impressions on legitimate websites, according to the ANA.
- South Africa’s invalid digital advertising traffic rate was 22.94%, above the global rate of 20.64%, according to Fraudlogix.
- South African advertisers could lose between R2.8 billion and R12 billion to ad fraud over the next 12 months, according to Marc Dhalluin of TruthsetsOnline.
- Ad fraud diverts advertising revenue from legitimate publishers, worsening financial pressure on South African newsrooms already facing declining circulation and search traffic.
- Advertisers can reduce programmatic waste by requesting impression-level data, prioritising trusted websites and using independent measurement to verify campaign performance.
Global ad spend is growing double digits, yet less than half of programmatic money ends up in fraud-free, viewable, measurable impressions. Marc Dhalluin argues the fault lies less with a few fraudsters than with a buying machine that rewards them.
Picture a car on black ice. The engine revs, the wheels spin, and the speedometer reads 100km/h. Every gauge on the dashboard says you are making progress. But you have not moved a metre.
That is much of digital advertising in 2026, even if it’s not openly acknowledged. Impressions, clicks, viewability, and cost per acquisition all measure motion. Very few measure actual traction. And everyone just keeps pressing the accelerator.
The money is certainly moving. WARC Media forecasts that global ad spend will grow 11.9% this year, to $1.34 trillion. Yet the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) latest Programmatic Transparency Benchmark found that only 43.3%* of first-quarter programmatic investment delivered fraud-free, measurable, viewable, and clear impressions on legitimate sites. More than half of the budget went elsewhere.
(*Our in-field analysis of campaigns shows this to be a conservative number.)
Most of the remainder goes to ad tech fees (about 60%) and ad fraud.
Checks and balances require modernisation. The filters are being bypassed.
Bots now outnumber people online. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report puts automated traffic at more than 53% of the web, with 40% classed as malicious. Good or bad, all bots initiate ad calls.
In March 2025, the research firm Adalytics published an analysis of traffic dating back to 2019. It reported that one widely used verification tag labelled bots that concealed their identity as human 77% of the time, and even self-declared bots as human 16% of the time. The vendors named dispute the findings, and the case is still being adjudicated.
Set the court case aside, and one point stands. Filters work from lists of known offenders, and fraud is a moving target. If declared bots get through at all, I suspect the ones built to pass as human do so much better.
Ad impression manipulation, where ads are not viewable by a human, now accounts for the majority of all digital ad wastage, especially ad fraud.
Fake sites, real invoices
Made-for-advertising (MFA) sites exist to harvest ad revenue, not readers. Credit where it is due: buyers have pushed back, and the ANA reported progress in reducing MFAs last year. But generative AI has made it almost free (and fast) to build a new one.
In March, DoubleVerify exposed AutoBait, a network of more than 200 AI-generated sites that served tens of millions of impressions to advertisers who didn’t know what they were buying. According to Axios, many were hosted on lapsed domains that once hosted genuine blogs, including one that had belonged to a financial blogger who had died. The fraud didn’t even build its own reputation. It borrowed a dead person’s!
The same logic runs through affiliate marketing, where commission goes to whoever touched the sale last. One fraud-tracking firm estimates that 8-15% of gross affiliate program spend is lost to fraud through exploits such as bonus abuse, click fraud, click injection, cookie stuffing, and fake signups, among others.
Ad impression manipulation
Most often, this has nothing to do with traffic quality, but rather where advertisers are paying for ad impressions served but not in a position where a human could have seen them: Ads stuffed into minuscule iframes, ads stacked 20 deep, ads rendered in the background, or not on the visible part of the page.
Why the buying machine buys badly
Programmatic was sold as precision. In practice, it optimises for what it can count, at speed, across more websites than anyone can inspect. The ANA’s 2023 supply chain study found the average campaign ran on 44,000 websites, and that only 36 cents of every dollar entering a demand-side platform effectively reached the consumer. Most damning of all, it found little to no link between inventory price and quality.
Advertisers have since cut that average to around 23,000 sites. That is still more websites than any media team could name. And when price says nothing about quality, the algorithm buys cheap. When your ad lands on a fake site where a bot clicks it hundreds of times, it feeds the algorithm bad data, and the machine learns to buy more of this fake inventory.
The gap between disciplined and undisciplined buyers is now the widest the ANA has recorded: top performers turned 54% of programmatic spend into qualified impressions in the first quarter of 2026, the bottom group just 32.1%: same channels, same quarter. The difference is scrutiny, not budget.
Honest publishers are paying for it
Every rand that lands on a fake site is a rand that never reaches a newsroom. The Competition Commission’s Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, finalised in November 2025, found that concentrated market power in search, social media and digital advertising sits at the centre of the weakening of South Africa’s news publishers. Money diverted to fake sites deepens a squeeze that local newsrooms can least afford.
Fraud isn’t the only cause of that squeeze, but it is the least defensible, and it adds to the downward pressure legitimate news organisations have faced since the advent of the internet.
Media24 has shut the print editions of Beeld, Rapport, Daily Sun and Volksblad, and closed City Press’s digital edition in May. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reports paid daily circulation down 8.6% in the year to June, and weekend papers down 14.5%. Going digital offers little shelter: Chartbeat data for the Reuters Institute shows Google search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites fell by a third in a year.
South Africa: R2.8bn to R12bn
South Africa is as susceptible as any other country. Fraudlogix’s analysis of 105.7 billion impressions placed the country’s invalid traffic rate at 22.94%, above the global figure of 20.64%.
We estimate that South African advertisers stand to lose between R2.8bn and R12bn to ad fraud over the next 12 months. The range is wide because nobody has properly measured this market. I suspect the true figure is closer to the top end.
Your brand pays twice
Your brand reputation is also at stake. DoubleVerify’s 2026 consumer research found that across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 42% of people would feel negatively about a brand after seeing its ads beside low-quality AI content, compared with 24% who would feel positively.
You pay once for the impression, and again for the reputation. A bad environment doesn’t just waste money. It tells customers what your brand will tolerate.
Agencies are feeling the squeeze
It has become fashionable to say agencies are in crisis. The evidence supports strain rather than collapse, and the difference matters.
WPP’s revenue less pass-through costs fell 4.7% like-for-like in the first half of 2026, with its top 25 clients down 6.3%, and average headcount dropping from 106,000 to 97,000. That is happening in a market growing at 11.9%, where WARC expects Alphabet, Amazon and Meta to take 59.7% of ad spend outside China. Clients are also building their own capability: 82% of ANA members had an in-house agency in 2023, and 65% had moved work away from external agencies in the previous three years. Yet 92% still used one.
So the money is not leaving advertising. It is leaving the old way of buying it. I suspect part of that is a trust problem: a client who cannot see what they bought eventually stops paying an intermediary to buy more. Agencies that bring independent proof to the table are best positioned to win that trust back.
Fix the gauges before you accelerate
None of this needs a new tech stack. Ask your partners what share of impressions was actually measured rather than sampled. Ask for impression-level data, not a dashboard summary. Build inclusion lists of sites you trust instead of chasing an endless list of sites you do not. And run a second, independent measurement alongside the incumbent to see whether the two agree.
That last step is my company’s business, so read it as an interested opinion. We do not ask anyone to take our word for it. Put the numbers side by side on your own campaigns. If they match, you have lost a fortnight. If they do not, you have found the leak.
The wheels will keep spinning either way. The question is whether you are watching the speedometer or the road.
If you would like a free forensic audit of your campaigns, mail me and we will compare the evidence side by side.
Marc Dhalluin is co-founder of TruthsetsOnline.
