Why am I being verified? +

• Unfortunately, the online advertising industry has become plagued with fraud as of late. Advertisers are paying for bogus traffic sent to fake websites. The bad actors that run these sham sites are cashing in, charging advertisers for ad impressions that were never seen by real humans. The cost of this fraud can be measured in two ways: a) the direct monetary cost of paying for bogus ad impressions, and b) a growing distrust by advertisers and investors in the interactive advertising ecosystem. In order to mitigate this worrisome situation, advertisers are demanding a new level of transparency when buying advertising on websites through ad networks and exchanges. Simply put, advertisers are requiring that their money only be spent on websites whose business integrity and continuity have been verified by an independent party. PubChecker conducts such verifications.

What's the benefit of voluntarily submitting to verification? +

• Advertisers have more confidence in websites that voluntarily submit to having their business integrity and operational continuity verified by an independent and trusted party. The online advertising world is quickly dividing into two camps: those publishers that are transparent about their business practices, and those that conceal their business relationships, purposefully or not. Ad networks, exchanges and advertisers often distrust the later. While many factors combine to ultimately determine your level of success in the business of online advertising, by voluntarily submitting to independent verification, you are more likely to garner an increased share of the total advertising spend, higher CPMs, and more access to brand dollars.

Is verification optional? +

• Yes. Entering into the verification process is completely voluntary—you do so at your own will, and of course you have the right to refuse submission into the process. However, you may encounter certain ad networks, ad exchanges and advertisers that require independent verification before they will enter into a business relationship with you. In general, ad networks and exchanges that require independent verification position themselves as “premium” sources of advertising inventory, and thus set a higher bar when evaluating new publisher partnerships. Ultimately it’s up to you to decide whether or not you are comfortable with submitting to verification. PubChecker will not conduct any verification service on sites/publishers that have not agreed to PubChecker’s Publisher Terms of Service.

Isn't this an invasion of my privacy? +

• No. PubChecker will not conduct any verification service on sites/publishers that have not first agreed to PubChecker’s Publisher Terms of Service. By agreeing to our Publisher Terms of Service, you are voluntarily requesting that PubChecker independently verify the information requested by us and submitted by you for verification. You may decide to withhold certain information you consider private, however, this may hinder our ability to verify particular aspects of your business integrity and operational continuity. Entering into contract with PubChecker for publisher verification services is a business decision you should consider carefully. You should evaluate your privacy concerns vs. the potential reward for verification. PubChecker takes great care in protecting the information you provide us during verification. PubChecker will never sell or share information provided by you during our verification process without your express permission to do so.

How will the information that I supply, and that you collect, be used? +

• During the verification process, PubChecker requests that you supply specific information about your business, your business relationships, your business practices and information about the management, ownership and/or controlling interests in your business. We may also request certain personal information about your managers, owners and investors—this personal information is used to help us verify and validate the controlling interests in your company. We verify with other trusted parties and sources, where possible, the accurateness and integrity of the information you supply. In general, the more detailed information you supply, the easier it is to verify. PubChecker also conducts online and offline searches of publically available records and materials related to your business, your business relationships, your business practices, management and ownership. The information you supply to PubChecker is verified and scored using our proprietary methodology, in an attempt to validate your business integrity and continuity. PubChecker will never sell or share information provided by you during our verification process without your express permission to do so.

Who will have access to the information I provide and the results of your verification process? +

• PubChecker’s staff, verification agents, and trusted business partners will have access to the information you provide for verification. All PubChecker employees, contractors and business partners are bound by a non-disclosure agreement. PubChecker will never sell or share information provided by you during our verification process without your express permission to do so. You may request PubChecker to share the results of our verification with your business partners. You may also request PubChecker to make the results of your verification public. All sharing of information is subject to PubChecker’s Publisher Terms of Service.

How long does verification take? +

• The length of our verification process depends largely on the information you provide, and the cooperativeness of you and your references during our investigation. In general, the more accurate and detailed the information you provide up front, the easier and faster it is for us to verify. Missing, inaccurate and vague information generally leads to a longer verification process. You and your references’ responsiveness to additional questions and processes may also affect the time it takes to verify your business integrity. Some publishers may be verified in a matter of days, while others may take weeks or longer. PubChecker endeavors to verify all publishers as quickly as possible (without sacrificing the integrity of our process) and to inform you of delays in the verification process when feasible.

How do you evaluate a publisher's business integrity? +

• The information you supply to PubChecker is verified and scored using our proprietary methodology in an attempt to validate your business integrity and continuity. PubChecker will never sell or share information provided by you during our verification process without your express permission to do so. We do not share the details of our proprietary scoring methodology, as we must protect our methodology from bad actors that might use this information to game our process. In general, the information that we are able to verify through our process receives a positive score, and when our investigation nets conflicting results, points are deducted from the overall score. A minimum confidence score is required for PubChecker to verify and validate a publisher’s business integrity.

What if I don't agree with your findings? +

• In some cases, and at PubChecker’s sole discretion, when PubChecker’s standard verification process does not end with a positive verification of a publisher’s business integrity, that publisher may be invited to submit additional information, references, documents and materials that will be used in a second attempt to verify a publisher’s business integrity. If at any time, you feel that you may have been treated unfairly during our process, you should email your concerns to PubChecker.

Once we've been verified by your service, can we promote our verification with other ad networks, exchanges, advertisers and business partners? +

• Yes. Once you have been verified and have received your certificate of verification from PubChecker, you may share and publicize your verification according to our Publisher Terms of Service. PubChecker will maintain a public list of publishers that have been verified by PubChecker, including the date(s) of verification and re-verification—you may request to be included on that list, however PubChecker reserves the right to remove publishers from the list, for any reason, and at its sole discretion.

Can I proactively retain your publisher verification services on my own? +

• Yes. Please use our Get Started form to begin your engagement and receive pricing information.

How much does verification cost? +

• Please use our Get Started form to request pricing information.

What's the benefit of having you check the business integrity of our publishers, we already do this? +

• There are several key benefits to outsourcing your publisher quality assurance program: 1) you’ll reduce your cost of publisher verification, thus reducing internal operational costs, as publishers will pay the cost of their own independent verification if they want to do business with you; 2) you won’t have to hire and train additional full time employees to do this job; 3) with current internal resources, you may only be able to conduct cursory checks (and not on all publishers in your network/exchange), but when you outsource to us, we’ll investigate all of the publishers you send us so you never have to ask yourself “did we do a thorough enough job validating these guys?”; and 4) your advertisers will be able to differentiate your advertising inventory from verified publishers, which should yield higher CPMs vs. inventory from unverified publishers—you’ll establish yourself in the market as a “premium” network/exchange.

Can we leverage our use of your publisher verification services with our advertiser clients? +

• Yes, you may share and publicize your use of PubChecker verification services according to the Terms of our Service Agreement with your company. Advertisers have become acutely aware of the fraud problem plaguing our industry. Accordingly, advertisers are demanding that ad networks and exchanges that aggregate supply from mid and long-tail publishers, vet those publishers to ensure that their sites are legitimate and ads will be served to real people on those sites. Chances are you have already had these kinds of conversations with your agencies and advertisers. We encourage our ad network and ad exchange partners to publicize their relationship with PubChecker. Upon request, we are happy to speak with your agencies and advertisers to explain our process, detail the extent of our verification services, and explain why verification of publisher’s business integrity helps prevent advertising fraud.

Operationally, what is required from us to start using your publisher verification services? +

• Getting started with PubChecker is easy! Upon executing our Service Agreement, we’ll schedule an initial call/meeting with your publisher onboarding team to discuss the logistics of implementing PubChecker. We’ll supply your team with a set of Web forms that you’ll implement on your site where publishers normally apply for onboarding to your network/exchange. These forms will replace your current onboarding application forms—you may elect to customize their look and feel to match your site. After successful testing, the PubChecker service will be live on your site and you’ll start directing applications to us for verification. That’s it!

Will you share our publisher list with our competitors? +

• No. According to the Terms of our Service Agreement, PubChecker will never sell or share confidential information without your express permission to do so.

Can we rely on verification reports submitted to us directly by publisher applicants to our network/exchange? +

• Publishers may have been previously verified by PubChecker, either on their own, or through another ad network or exchange. Publisher verification is portable, so long as it is kept current according to our Publisher Terms of Service. When onboarding a new publisher that claims to have already been verified by PubChecker, you should ask for a copy of their verification certificate (note that we purposefully do not publically disclose what these certificates look like, however your account representative will be able to send you an example with which to compare). To ensure that their verification is legitimate and current, you should cross-reference their verification certificate with our database of verified publishers and associated websites. Publishers are instructed to re-verify annually, and to immediately report to PubChecker any new websites under management or control by the publisher. If the website you are onboarding does not cross reference with the publisher’s listed sites on PubChecker.com, you should halt the onboarding of that publisher/site, and report the discrepancy to your PubChecker account representative.

How long does publisher verification take? +

• The length of our verification process depends largely on the information provided by the publisher, and the cooperativeness of the publisher and their references during our investigation. In general, the more accurate and detailed the information provided up front, the easier and faster it is for us to verify. Missing, inaccurate and vague information generally leads to a longer verification process. The publisher and their references’ responsiveness to additional questions and processes may also affect the time it takes to verify their business integrity. Some publishers may be verified in a matter of days, while others may take weeks or longer. PubChecker endeavors to verify all publishers as quickly as possible (without sacrificing the integrity of our process) and to inform them of delays in the verification process when feasible.

Do you provide "ad verification" services? +

• No. PubChecker does not provide real-time monitoring of websites or advertising traffic. While PubChecker encourages a multi-pronged approach to combatting online ad fraud, our service was specifically developed to stop bad actors before they enter your network/exchange. We verify a publisher’s business integrity and operational continuity during the onboarding process. PubChecker was founded because we didn't see fraud prevention solutions that raise the gates of access to our ecosystem, keeping fraudsters out in the first place. Other technology-based solutions assist in detecting fraud once the bad guys are already in. Rooting them out once they've established their foothold is a much tougher problem to solve than keeping them out in the first place.

How is PubChecker's service different from those offered by Dun & Bradstreet or the Better Business Bureau? +

• PubChecker is the only service of its kind focused solely on verifying the business integrity and continuity of online media publishers. Our mission is to help ad networks and exchanges build trusted publisher networks. Twenty years of experience combined with proven ad industry verification techniques, we sniff out sham website operators and fraudsters before they can take hold of your digital advertising inventory. Dun & Bradstreet focuses on the credit worthiness of companies, and the Better Business Bureau focuses on relationships between individual consumers and businesses. We employ components of both services as part of our verification methodology.

What are the details of your business integrity and continuity verification process? +

• We purposefully do not share the specifics of our verification practices and procedures, so they are not learned by bad actors attempting to thwart our process. We’ll be happy to share more details about our vetting process under NDA with qualified prospective ad network or exchange clients, agencies and advertisers. Please use our Get Started form to begin your engagement.