IAB to standardise viewablility to tackle ad fraud and ad blocking

The International Advertising Bureau Singapore (IAB) has announced a standardised measure to help advertisers and brands measure just how much mileage their ad is getting.by viewability it means the metric that tracks exactly what counts as a view on an ad. There are no standardised rules or guidelines on this in Southeast Asia and it is a massive problem. More mature markets such as the UK and US already have a standard established for this.Currently globally, $7.5 Billion is being lost per year on ad fraud. Besides bots there are even 'click farms' where people are just clicking and clicking for even a millisecond on ads and then losing advertisers and companies huge amounts of money. The highest rate of click fraud is in SEA, India and the Middle East, according to the IAB.To combat this, the IAB has created a Viewability Roundtable and Committee made up of members such as Google, LinkedIn, MediaCorp, SPH, Xaxis, Facebook, PubMatic and many more to create and establish a standard and guideline for the entire region to define exactly what viewability means and how this is defined in the region.The committee has had one major session so far and will continue this over the next four months.After thoughtful and engaging initial discussion, the majority of participants agreed that the metric that will be put forward to be tested by a third party such as Moat and/or ComScore for viewability in Southeast Asia, will be the MRC (Media Rating Council) standard of 50 percent pixels and view at 1 second.This means, someone will need to have clicked on an ad for at least 1 second and at least 50 percent of the pixels loaded in order for it to be counted as a ‘a view’ by a real person.The next few months will be dedicated to testing out these metrics and standards to try and eradicate the wide spread of bots and click farms who are affecting the whole region and digital industry.