Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was always the dominant strategy (grown from a kernel of organic, like all good ad fraud).
Another article about this kind of click fraud. And again only lots of details where the traffic goes and how it is then used to "spam" impressions on ads.<p>Does anyone understand what devices/users are actually going into this "funnel" and where they come from? Botnet? Junk traffic from porn sites? Iframes?
Crawlers & bots trigger video playback on the websites they visit, though it's probably unintentional in most cases. At Mux we have taken steps to identify such video views to limit their impact on aggregate video view performance metrics:
<a href="https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sheep-how-bots-react-to-web-video-2/" rel="nofollow">https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sh...</a>