Google acquires London start-up Spider.io to help crack down on advertising fraud
The company was bought for an undisclosed sum
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.The spree of takeovers in the global technology industry continued today as Google announced it is snapping up London firm Spider.io to help it fight advertising fraud.
The three-year-old company specialises in tackling online ad fraud, estimated to cost companies an estimated £6 billion each year. Spider.io identifies programmes that defraud advertisers through false traffic and other means, notably discovering the Chameleon botnet that was costing advertisers £4 million a month.
Google today announced it has bought Spider.io for an undisclosed sum, praising the company’s “world-class ad fraud fighting operation”.
Announcing the deal in a blog post, Google’s vice president of display advertising Neal Mohan said: “By including Spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.
“Our immediate priority is to include their fraud detection technology in our video and display ads products, where they will complement our existing efforts.”
The deal is the latest in a string of takeover deals in the tech industry. Last month Google paid £400 million for London-based artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind and last week WhatsApps was snapped up by Facebook for $19 billion.
Based in the West End, Spider.io was founded by Dr Douglas de Jager, who describes himself as a “poacher turned gamekeeper” on the company’s website.
De Jager previously founded BytePlay, which specialised in so-called “content scraping”, a practice that uses programmes to collect specific information from websites and is related to web automation, which simulates human browsing using computer software.
Spider.io’s seven employees will now join Google.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments