How ad networks and publishers are using page redirects and “pop-unders” to create tons of legitimate-looking traffic, a technique commonly found on porn sites
Craig Silverman / BuzzFeed :
Context & Ripple Effects
Craig Silverman has been documenting the ad-fraud economy at BuzzFeed for years: his 2015 reporting traced bot-driven click schemes costing advertisers billions, and just weeks before this piece he exposed how third-party video operators ran millions of fraudulent ad views through MySpace and GateHouse Media subdomains. This story marks an evolution in that arc — the fraud here doesn't need bots at all.
Instead of fabricating traffic, ad networks and publishers are borrowing real human visitors via page redirects and pop-unders, a technique long associated with porn sites. Because the users are genuine, the impressions slip past the bot-detection tools built after the schemes Silverman covered earlier — which is exactly what makes the technique harder to police than its predecessors.
First-order effects
- Advertisers buying this inventory pay for impressions from real humans who never chose to view the page, so their spend buys technically valid but worthless attention while their dashboards show clean, 'legitimate' delivery.
- Verification vendors whose filters were designed to catch non-human traffic now certify redirected pop-under inventory as authentic, giving the technique a stamp of legitimacy that pure bot fraud never had.
Second-order effects
- Publishers earning traffic honestly are undercut in programmatic auctions by rivals whose numbers are inflated by redirect chains, pressuring them to adopt similar tactics or lose share-of-wallet.
- Exchanges and verification firms face pressure to build detection for redirect paths and referrer laundering — a costlier engineering problem than bot filtering, since the traffic itself is real.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad fraud migrates from manufacturing fake traffic to laundering real traffic, forcing the industry to measure attention and intent rather than raw impression validity — a shift later coverage of exchanges looking the other way suggests was already underway.
- The persistence of these schemes across Silverman's reporting points toward structural distrust of open-web programmatic metrics, pushing brand budgets toward walled gardens where the seller also controls measurement.
The trend: Ad fraud is shifting from synthetic bot traffic to laundering real human attention through redirects and pop-unders, outpacing the bot-centric verification tools built to stop the last generation of schemes.