• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, September 11, 2013

It hasn’t been an easy transition, but the Web continues to be a safer, friendlier place for advertisers to reach consumers.

In fact, according to new research, improvements in media quality continue to rise -- with ad viewability increasing by as much as 5% year-over-year -- while cases of fraud are on the decline.

During the first and second quarters of the year, 61% of directly placed ads were in consumers’ view for at least one second, according to a new report from Integral Ad Science -- formerly AdSafe.

Viewability also improved across networks (to reach 43%) and exchanges (to 40%) -- although, in real-time bidding environments, 37% of bids were made on sites with less than 20% of ads in view by a human.

"What stood out for us this year -- a year when there has been heightened sensitivity and media coverage around fraud and other online advertising problems -- is that we've actually seen significant improvements in year-over-year media quality metrics,” Scott Knoll, CEO of Integral Ad Science, tells Online Media Daily.

“Ads are more likely to appear in viewable, high-quality, non-fraudulent environments than ever before,” Knoll said.

Specifically, fraud levels dropped from 30% of impressions to 20% across the exchanges, and only 2% of impressions were fraudulent across directly placed ads, Integral Ad Science found. “Some of the bigger distributors of fraud disappeared altogether,” Knoll said.

Still, in analyzing pre-bid impressions, Integral found that 22% of bid requests were made on sites exhibiting fraud.

The semiannual review included analysis derived from the company’s TRAQ score, which is designed to help buyers and sellers better value media based on brand safety, page content and structure, ad viewability, share of view, ad clutter, ad collisions, and likelihood of fraudulent or suspicious activity.

Results showed that ad placements bought directly from publishers had the highest average TRAQ score of 719 out of a possible 1,000. 

Networks, exchanges and hybrids each showed year-over-year improvements in average quality, with TRAQ scores of 605, 586 and 597, respectively.

“Media quality across RTB environments is improving, but we are still seeing too many bids being placed on poor-quality pages that are overly cluttered or more susceptible to impression fraud,” Knoll added.