DoubleVerify on May 7, 2026 published its 2026 Global Insights report on streaming television, titled "Must-CTV: Streaming's Shift From Promise to Performance." The findings are blunt. CTV fraud schemes and variants rose 140% in Q1 2026 compared with Q1 2025. The company identified more than 50 distinct bot attacks and variants in 2025 alone. And the number of fraudulent CTV apps detected last year was ten times higher than in 2024. For the marketing community, which has been moving budgets toward connected television at pace, those numbers raise an uncomfortable question: how much of the premium they are paying for streaming inventory is actually reaching a human viewer?

The scale of the problem

The report draws on proprietary measurement data spanning billions of impressions from campaigns where DoubleVerify (NYSE: DV) applied verification controls, alongside a parallel test campaign run throughout 2025 with no protections. It also incorporates surveys conducted by Sapio Research in February 2026, covering 2,020 marketing and advertising decision-makers across 25 countries and 22,000 consumers in 21 countries.

The headline fraud statistic - a 140% increase in detected CTV fraud schemes - reflects how rapidly the attack surface is expanding. According to DoubleVerify's report, fraudsters are using AI tools to scale their operations and generate more complex, harder-to-detect schemes. The parallel with defensive uses of AI is direct. The same technological capabilities that power pre-bid fraud filtering are also available to the people writing the scripts that those filters are trying to catch.

"CTV is attracting premium spend and bad actors right along with it," said Gilit Saporta, VP, Fraud Lab at DoubleVerify. "Our research shows fraudsters are quick to exploit inefficiencies in the ecosystem, using AI and limited transparency to siphon value from advertisers, with tactics that vary by market. Brands need to get ahead of it by eliminating low-quality impressions and focusing investment on inventory with a real chance to perform."

The financial cost in unprotected environments is quantifiable. According to DoubleVerify's methodology - which multiplies total violations by a cost per mille of $20.50 - fraud alone can cost advertisers approximately $1.8 million per billion CTV impressions served in campaigns lacking protection. The overall cost of forgoing media quality protections more broadly is estimated at $2.25 million per billion impressions. With trillions of CTV impressions served across the industry each year, the aggregate figure is substantial.

Protected versus unprotected: the performance gap

The contrast between protected and unprotected campaigns is sharp. In campaigns using DV's pre-bid fraud avoidance segments, the fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) violation rate was below 1% in 2025. In campaigns without those protections, 9% of impressions were not served to a real human. Ninety out of every thousand paid impressions, in other words, went nowhere that could produce a commercial outcome.

Viewability tells a similar story. The proportion of viewable CTV video impressions in DV-protected campaigns reached 94% in 2025, up from 80% in 2024 and 70% in 2023. Unprotected campaigns reached only 81%. One remaining friction point across all environments: 9% of CTV video impressions in Q4 2025 were still served in "TV-off" environments - devices that continued generating ad requests after the television screen had been switched off. This is a CTV-specific technical anomaly with no desktop equivalent, and it continues to affect both protected and unprotected campaigns, though at different rates.

Fraud varies sharply by geography

Not all CTV fraud looks the same. The dominant fraud typology differs by region in ways that matter for campaign strategy. In North America, bot fraud - computer programs mimicking human viewing behavior - accounted for 82% of violations. In Asia Pacific, nonhuman data center traffic dominated at 98%. In EMEA, data centers accounted for 66% of violations. In Latin America, the figure was 91%.

Bot fraud uses software operating at the device level to impersonate individual users. Data center fraud originates from centralized server facilities generating large volumes of non-human ad requests. Each type requires different detection mechanisms. The regional split means that a fraud prevention approach calibrated for North America is not automatically effective in Southeast Asia, and vice versa. The practical implication for global advertisers running multi-market CTV campaigns is that verification needs to be matched to the specific fraud profile of each region.

Within regions, the variance is equally striking. According to DoubleVerify's data, the CTV fraud/SIVT violation rate for protected campaigns dropped 68% year-over-year in North America, 72% in EMEA, 57% in Asia Pacific, and 98% in Latin America. Some individual markets moved in the opposite direction. Spain saw a 157% increase in violations. Vietnam and India also recorded increases. Brazil, Singapore, and Australia all recorded significant reductions.

The direct deal misconception

Perhaps the most commercially consequential finding in the report is that fraud is not confined to open programmatic inventory. A common assumption among buyers is that direct deals and private marketplaces (PMPs) offer a level of protection that open auction buys do not. DoubleVerify's data directly contradicts this.

According to the report, the DV Fraud Lab found significant bot activity in direct deal CTV inventory purchased by some of the largest brands in the world. Three 2025 campaigns provide specific figures. In a consumer healthcare campaign, 34% of impressions in a direct CTV deal went to bots. In a fast-moving consumer goods campaign, the equivalent figure was 25%. In a pharmaceutical campaign, it was 14%. All three were direct deals - inventory bought under the assumption of higher quality and cleaner traffic.

"There's a perception that direct deals in CTV are fraud-free, but that's not the case as fraud always finds a way," Saporta added. "It can exist anywhere inventory is bought and sold. Without independent verification and proactive protections, advertisers risk paying premium prices for impressions that deliver no real value."

This finding matters for agency trading desks and brand-side programmatic teams that have leaned on direct deals as a fraud mitigation strategy. The evidence in this report suggests that deal structure does not substitute for third-party verification.

The transparency deficit

Fraud is only part of a broader transparency problem documented in the report. Even setting aside invalid traffic, a significant share of CTV impressions do not end up in streaming TV content - despite buyers paying streaming TV CPMs for them. According to DoubleVerify's measurement, 66 out of every 100 monitored CTV impressions ran within streaming TV content. The remaining 34 served elsewhere - on music apps, fitness apps, teleconferencing platforms, screensavers, and other applications that run on CTV devices but are not streaming TV environments.

Streaming platforms often use audience extension networks to fulfill impression commitments when their core streaming inventory is insufficient to meet a buyer's volume requirement. A media buyer purchasing five million impressions may receive three million on the streaming app they intended and two million on other apps. According to the report, this misalignment between purchase intent and delivery costs advertisers an estimated $4 billion annually.

CTV app transparency - the ability to identify which specific app an ad ran on within a CTV device - improved 16% in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, according to DoubleVerify's data. But as recently as 2024, the company could only determine the host app for approximately half of all CTV impressions measured. Progress is real; the gap remains wide.

The report attributes part of the improvement to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) constraint environment in the US, which limits what streaming platforms can share about individual viewing behavior. Technical restrictions and platform-level data policies have historically prevented third-party measurement providers from seeing into streaming content. DoubleVerify launched a Certified Transparent Streaming program to address this, allowing publishers to contribute show-level data to a privacy-preserving clean room. Spectrum Reach is listed among the early participants.

Marketer behavior and the measurement gap

Only 21% of surveyed advertisers currently use invalid traffic or fraud detection as a key performance indicator for CTV campaigns. The most common KPIs are cost efficiency (40%), reach and frequency (39%), and viewability (38%). Fraud measurement ranked last among the thirteen KPIs listed in the survey. The report frames this as a structural problem: fraudulent impressions have no opportunity to drive outcomes. Every impression consumed by a bot is one that cannot contribute to brand lift, conversion, or any other commercial objective. Measuring performance without controlling for fraud creates an incomplete picture of what a CTV campaign actually achieved.

CTV impression volume and platform investment

Despite the fraud and transparency challenges, spending on CTV continues to grow. CTV impression volume across DV's measured campaigns grew 51% in 2025 compared to 2024, following 66% growth between 2023 and 2024. Regionally, Peru showed the highest growth in 2025 at 207%, followed by Colombia at 196%. Japan grew 115%, Saudi Arabia 119%, and the Philippines 140%. North America as a whole grew 52%, with the United States at 51% and Canada at 79%. Europe, Middle East and Africa grew 35%.

Seventy percent of surveyed marketers said they increased streaming investment in YouTube over the prior year - the largest increase of any platform in the survey. Netflix followed at 65%, Amazon Prime at 59%, and Samsung at 48%. And 69% of marketers surveyed by DoubleVerify said CTV ads outperform campaign baselines - a figure that puts the channel's hold on media budgets in context. Investment is continuing regardless of the fraud environment, which is itself part of what makes the fraud environment attractive to bad actors.

As CTV spending accelerates across the programmatic ecosystem, the conditions that drive fraud risk - high CPMs, limited transparency, fragmented measurement - are intensifying rather than easing. DoubleVerify has previously documented AI-powered fraud schemes operating at industrial scale across the open web. The CTV findings released on May 7 extend that pattern to the streaming environment. Show-level transparency has emerged as one of the key missing pieces across CTV buying, with measurement and verification companies addressing the gap from multiple angles.

DV Authentic Streaming TV

DoubleVerify launched DV Authentic Streaming TV in January 2026. The product combines pre-bid content discovery, brand suitability enforcement, and AI-powered optimization in a single workflow. It is built on DV's Media AdVantage Platform (MAP) and uses DV Scibids AI to shift spend in real time toward content with stronger reach, frequency, and conversion performance. The product also incorporates DV's Verified Streaming TV solution, launched the previous autumn, which uses pre-bid segments to ensure that streaming TV-designated inventory actually delivers on streaming TV apps rather than extension networks.

For brand suitability, DV has normalized over 7,000 content signals across leading demand-side platforms into more than 30 standardized content categories. The intent is to let advertisers set avoidance rules once and have them applied automatically across platforms, publishers, languages, and geographies - replacing the manual "Do Not Air" list management that currently requires separate setup on each platform. The content library on each platform is not static; shows come and go. Without automation, the operational burden of keeping brand suitability controls current is significant.

The broader measurement picture in the report is mixed but improving. The average global fraud rate for CTV video ads in DV-protected campaigns fell 69% in 2025 versus 2024. The CTV Authentic Viewable Rate - impressions verified as viewable, fraud-free, brand-suitable, and in-geo - reached 92% in North America and Latin America, 86% in EMEA, and 83% in Asia Pacific. North America recorded a 19-point improvement year-over-year; Latin America an 18-point improvement. Asia Pacific was essentially flat.

Why this report matters for media buyers

The 2026 DoubleVerify Global Insights report is significant for media buyers for several reasons that go beyond the headline fraud statistics. It provides one of the most detailed public accounts available of what actually happens to CTV ad impressions after a bid is won - where they serve, whether a human sees them, and what percentage constitute a complete waste of the budget.

The data on direct deal fraud is particularly relevant. The assumption that premium deal structures insulate advertisers from non-human traffic has shaped CTV media strategy for years. If a third of impressions in a consumer healthcare direct deal are going to bots, the commercial case for buying direct as a quality guarantee requires re-examination.

The attention measurement ecosystem now building around CTV provides one layer of quality signal, but it does not detect fraud - it measures engagement among whatever impressions survive the verification layer. Standardization efforts from IAB Tech Lab address technical fragmentation in how CTV inventory is defined and traded, but do not directly address invalid traffic. The fraud problem documented by DoubleVerify is distinct from these structural improvements - and the data suggests it is getting worse even as other aspects of the CTV ecosystem mature.

The survey finding that fewer than one in five advertisers currently measure IVT or fraud as a CTV KPI suggests the industry's response to this problem has not yet caught up with its scale. The ShadowBot fraud scheme documented by DoubleVerify in June 2025 - a single operation that generated over 35 million spoofed mobile devices in Q1 2025 - illustrated what a single fraud actor can achieve with AI-assisted tools. The 140% increase in CTV fraud schemes documented in Q1 2026 suggests the ecosystem's exposure to that kind of attack is growing, not shrinking.

Timeline

Summary

Who: DoubleVerify (NYSE: DV), a software platform for media quality verification and ad performance optimization, with data from campaigns across billions of impressions and surveys of 2,020 marketers and 22,000 consumers in more than 20 countries. Findings were attributed to Gilit Saporta, VP of the DV Fraud Lab.

What: The company's 2026 Global Insights report, "Must-CTV: Streaming's Shift From Promise to Performance," documents a 140% increase in CTV fraud schemes and variants in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, a tenfold increase in fraudulent CTV apps in 2025 versus 2024, and an estimated cost of $1.8 million per billion impressions for unprotected campaigns. The report also identifies a 34% bot fraud rate in one direct deal CTV campaign, challenging the assumption that direct purchases are inherently safer.

When: The report was released on May 7, 2026. Underlying data spans January to December 2025 for most metrics, with additional measurements covering Q1 2026 for fraud scheme counts and CTV app transparency. Consumer and marketer surveys were conducted by Sapio Research in February 2026.

Where: The findings cover CTV advertising globally, with specific regional breakdowns for North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Fraud typology data is organized by region, with North America showing predominantly bot fraud (82%) and all other regions showing predominantly nonhuman data center traffic. Country-level highlights include Peru (+207% CTV impression volume), Colombia (+196%), Japan (+115%), and Spain (+157% fraud increase for protected campaigns).

Why: CTV has grown into one of the primary channels for programmatic advertising spending, with impression volume growing 51% in 2025 and 70% of surveyed marketers increasing YouTube investment over the prior year. The combination of high CPMs, limited cross-platform transparency, and fragmented measurement creates conditions where fraud can persist at scale. The report makes a structural argument: without independent verification applied before and after a bid, a meaningful percentage of CTV budgets - even in direct deals - is not reaching human viewers.

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