Banners are useful for brand marketers despite “fraud”, because they're cheap and effective for raising awareness
Rick Webb / Medium : Tweets: @jasonlbaptiste , @timmcdougall13 , @treehcapital and @ertraeglichkeit Tweets: Jason L. Baptiste / @jasonlbaptiste : One of the best articles I've ever read on digital advertising from @rickwebb - “Banner Fraud Doesn't Matter” http://medium.com/... Tim McDougall / @timmcdougall13 : The case for why “Banner ‘Fraud’ Doesn't Matter” - because it's already been baked into CPMs - from @RickWebb #adtech http://bit.ly/1J0URzA Rob Majteles / @treehcapital : Oh my, I am sure this is well-intentioned & considered~but, @rickwebb's why banner ads are great is insane to me https://medium.com/... @ertraeglichkeit : We don't care anymore if anyone clicks through on our banners... we know most people don't see them. That's okay https://medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Rick Webb's Medium essay lands two months after bot-driven fake traffic schemes were projected to cost advertisers $6.3B this year, and it takes the contrarian position on exactly that story: fraud is real but already priced into CPMs, so banners remain cheap and effective for raising brand awareness even when impressions go unseen.
The reaction splits along familiar lines — Jason L. Baptiste calls it one of the best articles on digital advertising, Tim McDougall amplifies the baked-into-CPMs argument, while Rob Majteles dismisses the defense of banner ads as "insane" — foreshadowing the deeper effectiveness skepticism that would resurface years later in critiques of ad marketers optimizing for people who would have bought anyway.
First-order effects
- Brand advertisers reading this get permission to stop chasing click-through as the success metric and buy cheap banner reach instead, since @ertraeglichkeit notes banners can raise awareness even if never clicked or seen.
- Rick Webb's fraud-is-priced-in framing directly undercuts the urgency of the $6.3B bot-fraud narrative, forcing verification vendors and anti-fraud startups to argue value beyond what CPM discounts already absorb.
Second-order effects
- Publishers of low-cost remnant inventory gain an intellectual ally for keeping those placements on rate cards, while premium publishers selling viewability guarantees must now distinguish their product from fraud-tolerant cheap inventory.
- Ad-tech firms selling fraud detection face a pricing ceiling argument — if buyers accept inflated-but-discounted CPMs, the willingness to pay for clean traffic shrinks to performance-focused direct-response budgets.
Third-order effects
- If the priced-in logic holds, the industry's battleground shifts from eliminating fraud to measuring actual incremental impact — the question The Correspondent's skeptics later sharpen by noting benchmarks don't separate people converted by ads from people who would have bought anyway.
- A durable split emerges between brand budgets that tolerate waste for cheap awareness and direct-response budgets that demand verified outcomes, pressuring publishers and ad tech to segment inventory and pricing around that divide.
The trend: Digital advertising is splitting into two camps — brand buyers who treat waste like fraud as a cost of doing business, and skeptics demanding incremental-effectiveness proof — with measurement, not fraud detection, becoming the decisive battleground.