How invalid traffic gets credited without a ticket
Most networks make buyers prove fraud after the fact. Reconciling it automatically changes the incentives on both sides of the exchange.
The standard arrangement in adult media is that invalid traffic is a dispute. The buyer notices something wrong, assembles logs, opens a ticket, and negotiates. The network, which is paid on the disputed spend, decides the outcome.
That arrangement is not neutral, and everyone in it knows that. It also consumes an absurd amount of a media buyer's week.
Filtering before the auction
Most invalid traffic can be identified before a bid is ever submitted, which is the cheapest place to deal with it. Pre-bid checks cover datacentre and proxy origin, emulator and device-integrity signals, and behavioural scoring against the zone's own baseline.
Requests that fail are discarded rather than offered. They never appear in your reporting because you were never asked to bid on them, which is why our platform-wide invalid-traffic figure of about 1.4% is a post-filter number, and why comparing it to a pre-filter number from another network is meaningless.
Reconciling what gets through
Nothing catches everything. What matters is what happens to the remainder, and here the process runs without buyer involvement:
- 01Post-auction analysis flags impressions and clicks that later resolve as invalid.
- 02The amount is credited to the buyer's platform balance, normally within 48 hours.
- 03The same amount is deducted from the seller's earnings for that period, retrospectively where fraud is established.
- 04Both sides see the adjustment on the daily statement, against the specific zone.
The deduction on the supply side is what makes the credit credible. A network that refunds buyers out of its own margin has an incentive to refund as little as possible; one that claws back from the source has an incentive to find it.
Discrepancies are not fraud
Worth separating the two, because they get conflated constantly. Discrepancies of up to about 10% between exchange logs and a buyer's own tracker are normal. They come from timing, redirect loss and blocked tracker calls, not from anyone stealing. Those are not adjustable, and any network offering to credit them is telling you something about how it books revenue.
Invalid traffic is a different claim: the impression was served to something that was not a person. That one gets credited automatically, and you should not have to open a ticket to make it happen.