Are Non-English Sites an Exchange Problem?

“The brands aren’t participating in a real way yet because they’re afraid,” said Trust Metrics CEO Andrew Lerner. “They’re right to be afraid. There’s good apples and bad apples out there.”

It’s best to take these kind of stats with some perspective. Trust Metrics is in the business of guarding against quality issues for advertisers buying via exchanges. It would therefore be in its interest to play up the issue, much like click-fraud vendors were regularly sounding the alarm that huge chunks of paid search clicks were worthless.

Lerner allows it is in his interest to play up the problem his company is out trying to solve. Yet he stands by what the data his company sees shows. The solution isn’t to avoid exchanges, he said, but for buyers to take more safeguards.

The problem points to a paradox of the programmatic buying world. On the one hand it is about finding pinpoint audiences. Yet on the other it is about scale. Sometimes finding those narrow audiences at scale means going very far and wide. It’s not mistake, Lerner noted, that Forrester ranks demand-side platforms on the number of impressions they can ingest. With that many impressions in play, many will turn out on sites that are worthless because they’re stuffed with ads, not in English or have other quality problems, he said.