Programmatic risk: why elevated exposure is now the baseline, with Confiant’s Danielle Koffler
BY ROB BEELER + DANIELLE KOFFLER, STAFF PRODUCT MANAGER AT CONFIANT
While programmatic has delivered unprecedented scale for publishers over the years, it’s also handed them a supply chain they cannot fully see. Malicious and low-quality ads travel through the same trusted pipes as legitimate demand, and when something harmful reaches a user, it lands under the publisher’s brand, on the publisher’s page.
For most adops and revenue teams, ad security still sits in the “deal with it when it breaks” pile, treated as a hygiene issue rather than a structural feature of how programmatic now works. In this interview, Danielle Koffler, Staff Product Manager at Confiant, explains why that framing leaves publishers a step behind. Instead, as the last checkpoint in a long chain, they should be pushing pressure upstream, holding specific partners accountable, and giving their own leadership the visibility to act.
Rob and Danielle also dig into the numbers in Confiant’s latest ad quality report to unpack why elevated ad risk has become the baseline rather than a passing spike.
Rob: Publishers often treat ad security as a hygiene issue or something to address when an incident happens. What changes when they recognize that risk has become a structural part of the programmatic business?
Danielle: Treating ad risk as a hygiene issue means treating each bad ad as an isolated incident: something gets through, you block it, you move on. That would make sense if threats behaved like isolated events, but they don’t. The threat actors we track are built to survive being blocked, churning domains as fast as they get blacklisted and hopping across DSPs the moment pressure increases.
None of this is a publisher-level problem you can patch by blocking one seat or flagging one creative, because that means you’re always cleaning up the last wave while the next one is already forming somewhere else in your stack.
Instead, you need to shift to a structural view. Once inside, bad actors inherit the trust of everyone downstream, so you need to ask how these actors get in and transact through a chain of trusted partners in the first place.
It’s not economically viable for a publisher to cut off a demand source every time a threat shows up. But they’re not powerless either. They’re the last checkpoint in a chain with multiple earlier chances to stop the same actor, which gives them leverage to push upstream partners with harder questions: how are you evaluating your partners, what do you do when problematic behavior is flagged, and how fast do you act?
Publishers fighting this at the impression level are always a step behind, but those pushing pressure upstream can avoid refighting the same battle every quarter.
Rob: Your report says risk does not disappear as an ad moves through the supply chain. It gets stopped, passed along, or absorbed. Where are publishers already absorbing that risk without necessarily recognizing it?
Danielle: When a cloaked ad passes review and reaches a user, whatever comes next, be it a forced redirect or a fake tech support alert, occurs under the publisher’s brand in front of the publisher’s audience. The user doesn’t experience it as “a bad actor exploited a gap somewhere in the supply chain,” but rather “this site showed me something dangerous.”
That’s the absorption: the trust cost and the user relationship damage sit entirely with the publisher, even though the publisher never approved what ran and couldn’t see it beforehand. Domain rotation and DSP hopping make this a recurring cost. Blocking a domain doesn’t touch the seat or account behind it, so the same actor keeps generating new domains through a relationship that was never actually shut down, and the publisher keeps absorbing that exposure on a loop.
Rob: One in every 133 impressions in the report was dangerous or highly disruptive. How should a publisher interpret a number like that without either dismissing it as small or treating every impression as a crisis?
Danielle: The 1-in-133 figure is a useful wake-up call, but it’s an industry average. Google’s own security rate translates to roughly 1 in 73 ads, while the best-performing SSP in the same dataset runs a fraction of a percent, a 300x gap between partners facing the same threat landscape. Operationally, what counts is your own exposure: where it’s concentrated, which partners are driving it, and whether it’s improving or getting worse.
That’s also the kind of visibility that makes a real conversation with an SSP possible. “The industry average is concerning” is a headline. “Our rate with your platform is X, and the industry benchmark is Y” is a negotiating position. Publishers who don’t know their own number are stuck reacting to reports like this one in the abstract, instead of using them as a benchmark to hold specific partners accountable.
Rob: If elevated risk is now the baseline rather than a temporary spike, how should publishers distinguish between acceptable exposure and a sign that something in their operation or partner strategy needs to change?
Danielle: Benchmarking tells you whether you’re an outlier. It doesn’t necessarily tell you whether the exposure is acceptable.
A publisher with a partner whose rate is rising faster than the industry-wide trend has a partner problem, not baseline noise. A publisher whose numbers track the overall market’s rise is looking at exposure that’s roughly proportional to what everyone else is absorbing, so it’s elevated, but not an outlier. Our H1-H2 comparison shows exactly this kind of divergence: some SSPs cut their violation rates in the second half of 2025 while others, facing the same threats, saw theirs climb. That direction of movement relative to the baseline, rather than the raw number at any single point in time, is the signal worth tracking. It tells you whether a partner is actively managing risk or quietly letting it build.
Rob: More demand can improve yield, but the report also shows that it creates more paths through which risk can reach the user. How should publishers evaluate whether an additional demand partner is adding enough value to justify the exposure?
Danielle: Adding a demand partner should be evaluated on the same fronts as any other business relationship: what it’s worth, what it’s costing you, how the partner vets their partners, and whether they’re accountable when something goes wrong. The revenue side is the more visible part: publishers already track win rate, fill, and CPM lift. What’s more opaque is the rest. That means tracking violation rates specific to that partner, so you can see whether the demand you onboarded brings yield without a disproportionate rise in what your detection catches and blocks. So the real question goes beyond how much revenue a partner adds, to how much value they add relative to the risk they introduce.
Accountability is what separates a good partner from a bad one over time. Two partners can show the same violation rate on day one and diverge completely from there, based on what happens when a publisher flags a problem. The report shows some partners, facing the same threats, brought their numbers down over the course of the year while others let them climb. That response, not the partner’s initial numbers, is the real test of whether they’re worth keeping.
Rob: The highest SSP security rate was 300 times the lowest, even though those platforms faced the same overall threat landscape. What should publishers learn from that difference when evaluating the partners in their stack?
Danielle: Publishers who treat their SSP stack as interchangeable pipes for demand are ignoring a variable that swings user exposure by two orders of magnitude. Security rate data should be part of partner selection and conversations, not just fill rate and CPM comparisons. It’s leverage. If a publisher can show a partner its rate against the industry benchmark, or the average across its partners, that’s a concrete renegotiation point.
Rob: Security incidents, misleading ads, heavy formats, and missed category blocks are often handled as separate problems. Does that prevent publishers from seeing the full business risk to revenue, user experience, and trust?
Danielle: Publishers we work with don’t actually treat these as unconnected problems. They see security, misleading ads, heavy formats, and missed category blocks as risk. They shouldn’t be collapsed into the same problem, but they can be understood through the same business-risk lens: each can affect revenue, reputation, and the relationship with the user.
The harder issue is that they require different kinds of evidence and different responses. Security has a lower bar for consensus: malware is malware, a forced redirect is a forced redirect, nobody argues that a crypto drainer is actually fine. Quality is a different battle, with a level of subjectivity that makes it harder to act upstream. Pointing to a heavy ad or a misleading claim and asking a partner to tighten enforcement invites debate about where the line sits. While that debate plays out, the ad keeps running.
Rob: Publishers may understand the danger but still struggle to make the internal case for action. What should they measure or document to explain the economic cost of ad risk to leadership, and decide what to address first?
Danielle: The two things I’d measure are the partner scorecard and the response trend, mirroring what this report does at the industry level.
A scorecard tracks violation rates by individual partner, not blended across the stack, which hides the 300x spread our report found between the best and worst SSPs facing the same threats. Without that breakdown, leadership sees one aggregate number and has no way of identifying which specific relationship is driving it. With it, “our violation rate is elevated” becomes “partner X is driving the majority of our exposure, and these are the conversations we need to drive with them to get them into shape.”
The response trend counts as much as the snapshot. A partner’s rate at a single point in time tells you where things stand, but tracking it over two or three periods tells you whether that partner is actively fixing problems or letting them compound.
That’s the version of this data that actually moves a leadership conversation, because it names a specific partner whose number is getting worse every quarter while the others stay flat or improve. The goal is less about pricing every violation and more about giving leadership enough visibility to see where risk is concentrated, whether it’s moving the right way, and which relationships need action.
Ready to see your own number?
Elevated ad risk has stopped being a spike that passes. It is now the baseline publishers operate on, absorbed impression by impression under their own brand even when they never approved what ran.
As Danielle argues, the way forward runs upstream, not through impression-level cleanup. Start by knowing your own exposure rather than the industry average. Track violation rates partner by partner, not as one blended number. Then watch the direction of travel, because a partner quietly letting risk build can hide behind a single snapshot, but not behind trend. That’s what turns a report like this from a concerning headline into a negotiating position, and what gives leadership the visibility to decide which relationships need action first.
To find out where your own exposure sits, and how your partners stack up against the industry benchmark, download Confiant’s latest MAQ (Malvertising & Ad Quality) Index or speak to the Confiant team.
If you’re a publisher who wants a hand getting your own scores in front of you, or you just want to be in the room for the next Pub.Call, come find us at Beeler.Tech. And bring your tough questions. 👉Want to stay in the loop with what’s happening in the Beeler.Tech community? Subscribe to our newsletter. If you’re interested in attending or sponsoring a future event, you can explore our upcoming events here.