• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 23, 2022

AppLovin announced a partnership with HUMAN Security on Wednesday to provide protection against bot attacks and ad fraud across its monetization and marketing software.

With AppLovin’s recent integration of MoPub, MAX and its AppLovin Exchange, the company claims to run the largest mobile in-app exchange.

AppLovin rebuilt MAX in 2018 with a goal to offer a fair and unbiased platform to help publishers create a way to increase user engagement for advertisers, according to Idil Canal, general manager of business solutions at AppLovin.

“As we rolled out MAX to all developers in 2020, we saw a significant shift from traditional waterfall-based mediation to bidding as publishers and advertisers saw material gains,” she said. “That meant agencies, advertisers, and DSPs could bid more efficiently into increased publisher inventory. Advertisers had massive reach and publishers got more demand for their inventory.”

AppLovin acquired MoPub from Twitter in October 2021 for $1.05 billion, and then integrated its features with MAX, the company’s monetization platform for app developers that runs the entire auction in real-time while bidding on mobile ad impressions.

Prior to the acquisition, AppLovin did not provide a programmatic exchange. “We were a pure-play SDK-based mediation solution,” she said.

Today, the AppLovin Exchange brings in some of the top programmatic demand from agencies, trading desks, and more than 150 global demand-side partners (DSPs).

“By the end of 2022, we project more than $15 billion of media transacting through the combined platform,” she said.  

The partnership with HUMAN will allow AppLovin’s clients to monitor fraud and traffic quality. AppLovin also will join The Human Collective to combat fraud with other members such as The Trade Desk, GumGum, MediaMath, and others.

This partnership also will leverage MediaGuard — HUMAN’s pre-bid and post-bid traffic quality protection product — to combat invalid traffic (IVT) in preventing non-human ad views across AppLovin’s platform.

Publishers will have an added layer of protection from malicious highjacking traffic schemes. HUMAN verifies more than 15 trillion digital interactions weekly.

AppLovin has also expanded its brand-safety solution offering, Ad Review, to cover a full suite of ad formats and creatives, such as banners and playables. Ad Review scans banner ads running in apps and other formats that MAX supports, and protects from the malicious auto-redirects running in apps across all demand sources, finding problematic ads automatically in order to protect the user experience.