Here, Dan Johns from Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory argues that a meaningful share of digital ad spend is never reaching real people, instead being absorbed by bots, fake sites and a programmatic supply chain built to obscure where the money actually goes.
I’m going to tell you something the ad industry already knows but won’t say out loud.
A meaningful (aka massive) chunk of your digital ad budget is not reaching a human. It’s being consumed by bots, fake websites and a supply chain that runs on the incentive to keep you in the dark.
This isn’t a fringe theory; it seems to be what happens when you follow the money.
How we got here
Before programmatic, buying media was relatively straightforward. You called Nine or News Corp, agreed a rate, and your ad ran in front of people who read or watched that publication. The supply was real because it was finite. Real humans, real pages, real limits.
Then programmatic exchanges arrived and suddenly there was unlimited inventory. Billions of impressions available from sites you’d never heard of, at prices that kept dropping. Every demand platform promised hockey stick growth in reach.
Dr. Augustine Fou is an independent ad fraud researcher who has been studying this for fifteen years. His point is simple, that human internet usage completely plateaued around 2013. Every person is already maxed out on their phone and laptop and the actual amount of human attention available online has not grown. The number of ad impressions being bought and sold kept going up and up and up.
If the audience isn’t growing but the inventory is, where are all those impressions going? The answer is fake websites. Sites with no real audience that buy bot traffic, load ads in invisible windows and collect the CPM. Simple, scalable and running for over a decade.
Imperva’s bad bot report highlighted that automated traffic (51%) surpassed human traffic (49%) on the internet in 2024 and Wikipedia are blocking over 2 billion bot visits a day!
Why nobody stopped it
The fraud persisted not because nobody noticed, but because everyone in the chain had a reason to look the other way.
Advertisers wanted low-cost volume. Agencies made more money on higher volumes and exchanges took a cut on every transaction regardless of quality (human or bot). Verification vendors sold reports that told advertisers fraud was low, which kept the whole thing moving.
According to the recent Next and Co Digital Media Waste Report, Australian advertisers wasted a record $123 million in a single quarter in 2024, which means an average of 44 cents in every audited dollar achieved nothing. Our independent audits back this up with at least 30% and climbing to 50% of digital activity lost to fraud.
The incentives problem
Ad fraud is not a technology problem. It’s an incentives problem.
When you buy programmatic through an open exchange, cheap high-volume inventory only exists in one place. The long tail of sites nobody has heard of. Legitimate publishers with real audiences are valuable and finite, whereas fake publishers are cheap and inexhaustible.
As long as you chase low CPMs and high-volume impressions, the fraud stays because it’s what makes those numbers possible.
Why Australia is well placed to fix this
Our digital media landscape is concentrated and well understood. The publishers Australians actually read and watch are well known. Nine, the ABC, News Corp, The Guardian, Are Media, Pedestrian Group. You don’t need hundreds of thousands of sites to reach Australians online.
The programmatic long tail that causes so much damage in larger markets is proportionally less central here, but Australian brands are still routing spend through open exchanges where that long tail gets bundled in by default.
The fix isn’t better verification software. It isn’t a new AI-powered fraud detection tool that will tell you the same story the last one did. It’s buying from publishers you know, with audiences you can verify, and measuring what actually happens before and after the click.
Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory uses Deltrix, built on FouAnalytics, to give Australian CMOs an independent view of where their programmatic spend is actually going. The audit takes days to weeks, not months.
