Pixalate Blog

Pixalate's April 2025 Recap: Ad Fraud, MFA, CTV Device Market Share, and More

Written by Pixalate | Apr 30, 2025 4:45:00 PM

Discover the latest in programmatic research in Pixalate's monthly recap.

What's included in the April 2025 recap:
Our latest release:

Top releases from earlier in the month:

IVT & Ad Fraud Benchmarks - Q1 2025

31% of global mobile app traffic was invalid in Q1 2025. The IVT & Ad Fraud Benchmarks Reports analyze invalid traffic and ad fraud across 16 countries in Q1 2025, using data from over 100 billion global programmatic ad impressions.

The insights are derived exclusively from Pixalate's datasets, which are primarily composed of buy-side open auction programmatic traffic sources.

Download the latest reports here:
 

CTV Device Market Share Reports - Q1 2025

Discover which CTV devices drive the most open programmatic ad traffic. Pixalate’s CTV Device Market Share reports offer key insights for advertisers and stakeholders navigating the evolving CTV advertising landscape in 2025.
 
These reports are based on time series data from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025, ranking devices by their quarterly share of voice (SOV) in open programmatic advertising globally and across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico.

Download the latest reports here:
 

MFA Benchmarks - Q1 2025

$778M+ was spent on MFA content in Q1 2025, down from $950M+ in Q4 2024. MFA sites often employ intrusive ad tactics, resulting in poor advertising-to-attention ratios. Pixalate’s Q1 2025 MFA Benchmarks Reports analyze ad trends across MFA websites, mobile apps, and CTV apps.
 
The reports offer insights into ad spend, invalid traffic, ad fraud, and other key metrics. Unlike crawl-based approaches, which can be gamed, Pixalate identifies MFA content through observed global traffic patterns.
 
Key Findings (Q1 2025):
  • 10% of global open programmatic web ad spend—approximately $701M—went to domains identified as MFAs.
  • An estimated $64 million in open programmatic ad spend was directed to MFA mobile apps.
  • An estimated $13 million went to MFA CTV apps.
Download the latest reports here:
 
       

Top 100 CTV Bundle IDs - March 2025

Check out the most popular Bundle IDs for programmatic advertising in CTV. Our team analyzed 1.4B+ impressions across 6k+ Roku, Samsung, Fire TV, and Apple TV apps. Bundle IDs were ranked after filtering out invalid traffic (IVT). 
 
The reports also include the top 10 most popular Bundle IDs for each CTV platform for key regions including North America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Latin America (LATAM).
 
Download the CTV Bundle ID rankings here:
 
           

Top 100 Mobile Bundle IDs - March 2025

Revealing the most popular mobile app Bundle IDs in March 2025.
In addition to the top CTV bundle IDs, we also announced the most popular Bundle IDs for open programmatic advertising across iOS and Android apps available to download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. In particular, we looked at the top Bundle IDs across 13 countries.
 
You can download the rankings here:
 

Top Grossing CTV & Mobile Apps - March 2025

These apps generated the most revenue through open programmatic advertising.
Alongside the CTV Device Market Share rankings, we also revealed the top-grossing CTV and mobile apps across 16 countries.
 
The rankings are based on an analysis of 30B+ impressions from 6M+ apps. Estimated programmatic ad spend was calculated using proprietary statistical models that factor in monthly active users (MAU), average session duration per user, average category CPM, and ad density.
 
You can download the rankings here:
 
   

Publisher Trust Indexes - March 2025

Explore which publishers delivered the most trustworthy inventory in March 2025.
Pixalate’s Publisher Trust Indexes (PTIs) rank the top web domains, mobile apps, and CTV apps for open programmatic advertising quality.
 
The rankings are powered by Pixalate’s proprietary technology and methodology, which evaluate factors such as publisher popularity, invalid traffic (IVT), brand safety, ads.txt and app-ads.txt compliance, Made-for-Advertising (MFA) status, ad density, viewability, and more. The March 2025 Indexes are based on 39B+ global open programmatic impressions across 14M+ domains and apps.

Download the reports here:
 
       

Monthly Delisted Mobile Apps - March 2025

59K apps were delisted from the Apple App Store, 48K were delisted from Google Play. To track monthly delisting trends in March 2025, our team analyzed 7.6M+ apps across the Apple App Store and Google Play. These reports include delisting trends among apps with detected app-ads.txt files, regional and country-specific insights, and more.
 
Download the March 2025 reports here:
 
   

CTV Malformed and Fraudulent Bundle IDs Risk Reports - Q1 2025

Only 33% of Bundle IDs across Apple TV traffic used actual App Store IDs in Q1 2025, requiring the remaining traffic to be mapped. The Q1 2025 CTV Malformed and Fraudulent Bundle IDs Risk Reports include a detailed analysis of the global state of non-standard and malformed Bundle IDs in the open programmatic advertising supply chain.
 
Our team analyzed 2B+ transactions across 14k+ CTV Bundle IDs linked to 6k+ unique CTV apps on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, and Apple TV traffic in March 2025.
 
Read the latest reports here:
 
           

CTV and Mobile App Manual Reviews

Pixalate's Trust & Safety Advisory Board regularly publishes manual reviews where they assess an app’s child-directedness:

You can search Pixalate's entire catalog of reviews on our CTV and Mobile App Review Page.

Recent Events

Pixalate at POSSIBLE Miami - April 28-30, 2025

Guests stepped aboard our private yacht for a refreshing escape from the conference floor. We made waves with like-minded professionals and explored our market-leading ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance solutions in a sophisticated and relaxed setting docked across from the Fontainebleau.
 
Didn't have a chance to meet us in Miami? No worries, you can still book a meeting: 
 

 

Pixalate at GTC2025 - April 24-25, 2025

GTC2025 was an incredible success. The energy at the Futian Convention Center was electric, with innovators and industry leaders from around the world gathering together to shape the future of tech. A big thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth to chat with the Pixalate team: Alvin Ling, Yee Yin Thor, Alicia DuEdwin Tan, Caroline Lim, and Summer Zhang. It was a fantastic opportunity to explore how Pixalate is helping partners elevate traffic quality, reduce invalid traffic, and optimize the supply path.