• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 5, 2024

DoubleVerify has discovered media buyers have purchased more than 45,000 monthly impressions on dozens of popular white-noise apps that help people sleep, but those apps at night are stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in advertising.

For the past two years, dozens of apps were discovered, and even with a conservative estimate of audio CPMs at between $5 and $7 -- although many of them cost more than $20 -- DoubleVerify estimates the cost of the theft at about $225,000 per app monthly.

Examples of apps include “Deep Sleep” and “Deep Sleep Kids,” which have more than 10,000 downloads each, an “E” rating, and 5-star reviews. 

DoubleVerify identified the fraud because the apps faked serving impressions during the day, which doesn’t match the typical nighttime activity of legitimate white-noise or sleep apps.

That activity, along with other changes, have signaled a growing concern around audio fraud. In the last year alone, DoubleVerify identified two global fraud schemes targeting audio streaming: BeatSting and FM Scam.

These operations falsify audio traffic using sophisticated methods such as dedicated servers, leading to substantial financial losses.

At their peak, these schemes collectively inflicted over a million dollars in monthly damages on advertisers without verification protections in place.

In 2023, bot fraud escalated at an alarming rate on streaming platforms, with a 269% increase in variants, according to the company’s DV Global Insights: 2024 Trends Report.

This contributed to a 58% increase in streaming fraud schemes and variants compared to the previous year.

DoubleVerify identifies the same pattern with mobile and connected TV (CTV) where fraudsters consistently move toward emerging channels.

On the surface, these apps seem safe and legitimate. But DoubleVerify discovered they generate fake streaming data by selling audio impressions where ads were never actually played. The developer executes this through a method like server-side ad insertion (SSAI) fraud found in CTV.

One way to identify this fraudulent activity is to look at the use patterns of white noise or sleep apps. These apps typically see more use during nighttime hours, but fraudulent apps will show a spike in use during the day. 

In a chart that breaks down audio impressions by the hour, advertisers can see how a fraudulent sleep app demonstrates the same traffic patterns as other apps, such as those playing yoga music, R&B music, arcade music and exercise sounds. These apps all show a simultaneous spike and fall in their number of impressions, which is a classic signal for fake traffic. 

DoubleVerify said it’s unlikely that the peak use hour for genuine R&B music apps would be at 11:00 am, and it’s even more unlikely that this would correlate perfectly with the use patterns of both exercise music apps and sleep apps. The only plausible explanation for this level of correlation is that the audio traffic on these apps are fake, generated impressions that are being fired by scripts or bots.