Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 1)

Click fraud in online advertising is a huge issue. This interview explore the subject in some depth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to eZanga.

Rich Kahn: I’m CEO and co-founder of eZanga.com. We’ve been an online marketing firm for the past 12 years. I’ve actually been in the space for more than two decades. With eZanga.com, we’ve been focusing heavily on click traffic. We’re driving traffic to people’s websites. More recently, we’ve gotten into the call space as well. One of our key focus is making sure that traffic coming through our network is clean for our clients so they don’t have to deal with fraudulent traffic issues when buying traffic from us.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a lot of fraudulent traffic that comes in through these clicks?

Rich Kahn: The whole Internet, as a whole, has a lot of fraudulent traffic floating around including some of your best sources like Google and Yahoo!. They all have issued with fraudulent traffic for a number of reasons. We can get into some technical reasons later. Everybody is dealing with some level of fraud. Depending on the source that you read, it’s typically around a third of the traffic on the Internet. There is a lot out there. Of course, if a third of your budget is getting chewed up by fake traffic, it can be an issue.

Sramana Mitra: How do you tackle that? What is your approach to addressing that?

Rich Kahn: The easy way to describe it is we’ve built, over the years, a series of tests that bots can pass but humans cannot. We have a series that human can pass but bots cannot. Based on all that, we are able to identify real and fake traffic. We are able to do it in real-time. If our publishers are saying, “I’ve got a content article on the new iPhone.” They’re asking us for any ads or anybody who wants to advertise on an iPhone content-rich page. We can decide if that traffic request is real or not at the beginning of the stage because if we decide that the traffic request coming into us is not real, we don’t even expose our client’s ads to that particular traffic source. However, once it gets into our network, as the click goes through our system, we do a complete validation of that click in real-time to identify whether it’s a real click or a bot. We’re able to eliminate it before the client actually pays for the click.

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that?

Rich Kahn: With a lot of complex code. We actually have done some research over this recently for a talk I was giving. Somewhere around 700,000 lines of code – the equivalent of about 35 plus years of development time to put this together.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga
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