Clean.io this year saw a surge in malicious ad activity related with the COVID-19 pandemic. Matt Gillis, CEO of clean.io, wrote the lower CPMs and an increase in traffic have created the perfect storm for bad actors to disrupt end-user experiences and impair publisher monetization.
Ezoic says that the coronavirus pandemic causes historic low CPMs, back to 2016. News websites had an increase number of unique visitors because of COVID-19.
clean.io is used by thousands of sites and apps that generate tens of billions of monthly page views, globally. clean.io data shows that threat levels were 50x higher than the baseline set in early March.
According to clean.io, the surge in malvertising has been quite significant in the United States compared to the rest of the world.
In the fight against bad ads, Facebook last month filed a lawsuit over a cloaking software that circumvented ad review systems.