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Comment by yilugurlu | Hacker News Reader

I guess the advertisers whose video ads run in the background don't care about ad viewability.

Most of our advertisers require at least %90 of viewability, big brands. But a still significant amount of them use VAST and don't care about any other measurement. When we ask them to if they have VPAID tags many times they just say no, we only have VAST.

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Seems like an impossible arms race though (to fake viewable) plus it looks like this fraud was a VPAID container.

VPAID adds a overhead compared to the possibility of a native implemented VAST player. If there was a way to verify & build trust with pubs/networks to run vast tags natively, no JS, I would buy that inventory. Newer vast also has a viewable event, but again is on the pub to specify legitimately hence the verifiable trust. There's a reason FB gets a lot of my $$

Between players, ad network wrappers, third party service wrappers, creative teams getting the spec wrong, more requests for ad blockers to block etc., VPAID is a mess in terms of successful playback though. It's like developer for early 2000s browsers when you have to test in multiple tools and work around multiple quirks. I can see why advertisers might not want to bother.

I'm with you. I would prefer the much simpler VAST (maybe even change to json lol) with trusted/verifiable publishers. It can be natively implemented and not have to call webviews and all kinds of js bloat! I just dont know how to make that happen. In essence it's what FB offers just using their own internal video delivery platform.

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