Earlier this month of May, the UK Gambling Commission fined the gambling company FSB £600,000 for responsibility failures surrounding its advertising in the UK, including misplacing ads on pirate websites.
Read more here: https://bit.ly/2zGIg8P
Gambling ads are often placed on pirate publishers due to (poor) algorithmic decision-making that associates pirate sports streaming with broader (legitimate) sports betting. The problem arises when technology fails to filter out risky publishers like pirate streaming websites. Until brands have complete transparency over their advertising supply chains, this issue will continue.
However, on a positive note, although historically, gambling has been the top ad sector by impression volume placing ads on pirate websites, this is changing. In April 2020, ads from the gambling sector represented less than 2% of all advertising on high risk pirate websites in the UK, a drastic reduction from previous years.
Advertising impression volume by branded ad sector, across high risk pirate websites in UK during April 2020
Regulatory efforts such, as those adopted by the UK Gambling Commission, together with increased internal action by brands’ own advertising teams, means progress is being made. Of course, the current health situation may have had a temporary impact on sports betting advertising helping to reduce figures. However, the changes we see are consistent with an overall decline in gambling ads on pirate websites.
Many major gambling companies are taking positive steps to better understand the websites where they advertise, putting in place transparency tools, including our own ad tracking analytics suite , to monitor and assess their advertising compliance. Moving towards safer websites and better contextual content targeting, means brands protect themselves as well as reduce the ad revenue driving damage from IP infringement.
Inadvertent ad funding of online piracy is likely to continue, but the tide is changing in this sector where brands and regulators collaborate effectively.
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We have been actively working with many major gambling brands to help deliver their compliance programmes with great success.
For more information about how we can help with ad placement transparency please contact us here - https://www.white-bullet.com/contact .
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