The search giant has really made a goal from turning the Internet into a safer place. After Impermium and SlickLogin, now Google bought Spider.io, a London-based startup focusing on online advertising fraud.
The main reason why Google acquired online ad fraud fighter Spider.io was to make things more transparent for advertisers. It definitely looks like Google has also saved some of its precious time by buying the seven-member team, as Spider.io had already spent 3 years creating a solution to click theft.
Google’s VP of display advertising Neal Mohan mentioned today in a blog post that “This vibrant ecosystem only flourishes if marketers can buy media online with the confidence that their ads are reaching real people, that results they see are based on actual interest. To grow the pie for everyone, we need to take head on the issue of online fraud.”
Spider.io’s fraud detection technology will be implemented in Google’s video and display ads products (most probably in the Google Display Network and YouTube advertising). Mohan continued by saying that “Over the long term, our goal is to improve the metrics that advertisers and publishers use to determine the value of digital media… Also, by including Spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.”
The problem that the newly acquired company comes to solve is click spoofing, one of the most widely spread threats that online advertisers can face. This is done either by bots or by human dupes, and the result affects both the advertisers and Google, whose entire business model is based on this industry. Obviously, Google has tried to solve this problem over the years, but not it will much easier, as it owns a specialized solution.
Google did not disclose any details regarding the acquisition of Spider.io, so it’s anyone’s guess as to when the transaction will be completed or how much the search giant spent on this company. Regardless, it’s great to see that one of the tech titans is also interested in making the lives of advertisers better (well, that’s in its interest, as well), not just in investing in robotics, AI and 3D mapping smartphones. Each of these projects or acquisitions has something special in its own, and Google seems to put its fingers in a lot of pots, something that usually ends well for such a company.
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