Comment by Semaphor

As someone working for a small publisher: The amount of "don’t care" is amazing. We tried 2 different big and popular "programmatic bidding" platforms. The amount of scams and extra-shoddy ads was crazy. And for each we realized after talking to our partner manager that caring about that is not expected. There are no or not enough controls to prevent it.

We managed to get into google ad exchange (via a personal connection as we’d normally be too small to get there directly, it’s essentially adsense with more control and more money), and compared to the other players we saw, they are much better by default already. But then you can also set minimums etc. This will lower your payout, but significantly raise the quality of your ads.

So when a publisher has all those scam ads, it’s either lack of knowledge and care, or a choice.