In a presentation at The International Anti Counterfeiting Coalition (IACC)’s 2026 Annual Conference, an executive of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an anti-fraud organization in the digital advertising industry, presented two case studies.
In the first case, a single intermediary served roughly 11.8 million ad requests and 14,000 ad impressions to one pirate site, generating a minimum of $5,327 in pirate ad revenue at a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of $0.45.
When TAG scaled the analysis to include three intermediaries across 11 pirate sites, every company had unwittingly served ads on at least one pirate site in the dataset.
The second case study illustrated an equivalent to the media and entertainment industry’s site-blocking efforts. In that case, a content exchange forum run by TAG was able to flag ad impressions on a pirate’s live sports broadcast fast enough with intermediaries to cut off impressions in less than a day.
TAG ad-fraud takedown efforts
TAG hosts several resources in an effort to stop ad dollars from reaching criminal enterprises:
- Pirate Mobile App List (PMAL) – A list of apps that have been removed from app marketplaces for copyright infringement, helping intermediaries identify apps that should not be funded.
- Pirate Domain Exclusion List (PDEL) – A list of websites that promote pirated content, so intermediaries can choose to demonetize those domains.
- Piracy Threat Exchange (PTX) – a forum through which content owners and ad tech companies can share timely intelligence on pirate sites and tactics to prevent them from stealing ad revenue, so the good guys can move faster than the criminals.
Why it matters
Just as is the case for media and entertainment content, no single stakeholder can solve ad-funded piracy alone. Fighting the ecosystem of content thieves and their constantly changing tactics requires collaboration and coordination.
But there’s also a difference: in the United States, which lacks a government-mandated site-blocking regimen, Web site takedowns for media content take time, often requiring court orders. This led TAG to assert that ad demonetization can happen more quickly than a full takedown.
However, outside the United States, the de-facto time-to-blocking goal (and sometimes, government mandate) for media and entertainment stakeholders is 30 minutes; many times more quickly than TAG’s second ad-blocking case. Ad industry stakeholders would surely appreciate a 30-minute blocking mandate.
Further reading
TAG Today. Monthly newsletter. May 2026. Trustworthy Accountability Group.
