This week's review of ad fraud and privacy in the digital advertising space:
Pixalate published the Q2 2022 Google vs. Apple COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) Risk Scorecard Report examines the state of children’s online privacy across apps available for download in the Google and Apple app stores. The report summarizes Pixalate’s Q2 findings surrounding COPPA risk in the Google Play and Apple app store, finding an 8% overall increase in apps likely directed at children from Q1 to Q2.
Pixalate analyzed over 5 million apps available for download via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store as of the last date of Q2 2022 and found that over 422,000 are likely child-directed. Pixalate also found that over 70% of the top 1,000 most popular apps that are likely directed to children on both Google and Apple shared either GPS coordinates or residential IP addresses with advertisers during Q2 2022. Open programmatic advertisers also spent 4.1x more per app on child-directed apps (compared to general audience apps) in Q2 2022, according to Pixalate’s estimates.
Pixalate released the July 2022 Supply-Side Platform (SSP) Global Market Share Rankings for both Connected TV (CTV) and mobile in-app. The rankings feature the top SSPs by open programmatic ad market share for apps across the Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Google Play, and Apple app stores.
In North America, Magnite led in market share for Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, while Bidswitch topped the Google Play store and InMobi finished first in the Apple app store. The list of full rankings by region and device is available here.
VlionMobi, a global performance marketing platform focusing on e-commerce and programmatic advertising, announced their partnership with Pixalate to combine “the fraud protection, privacy, and compliance analytics platform’s offerings with its inventory to better identify fraudulent advertising.”
Alvin Ling, director, customer success at Pixalate, said of the partnership, "Vlion has a strong technical team and a deep understanding of Pixalate’s products. We are proud to be a marketing partner with Vlion and look forward to the increased visibility it will provide for both customers and the ad industry as a whole.”
MediaPost covered Pixalate’s Q2 SSP market share report, highlighting Magnite and Comcast’s FreeWheel finishing first and second in the CTV rankings.
On the mobile side, MediaPost notes that “in mobile, the top five SSPs for Google Play in North America are unchanged since the last rankings, in April.” In the Apple app store, rankings changed slightly with Inmobi leading with a 9% share, followed by Moloco at 7%-- notably the first time Moloco has broken into the top 10.
The Washington Post detailed a countersuit Tesla CEO Elon Musk is filing against Twitter, claiming the platform misled his team and Wall Street investors as to number or fake or “bot” accounts and “about its true advertising base, constituting a reason for him to back out of his agreement to purchase the site for $44 billion.”
Musk now wants to terminate the deal he came to with Twitter in April to buy the platform claiming “that while Twitter touts having 238 million monetizable daily active users, the proportion that actually see ads is 65 million lower. Further, they argue, the majority of ads are shown only to fewer than 16 million users, which is less than 7 percent of the number of users Twitter claims can earn the company revenue by seeing ads.”
For its part, Twitter has claimed that Musk is only pointing to select numbers and that Musk’s claims do not actually represent the advertising marketplace it operates.
