Introduction

Confiant’s Malvertising and Ad Quality (MAQ) Index is the oldest and most comprehensive analysis of creative quality and security in the digital advertising industry.

Issued twice a year, the report draws on Confiant's proprietary sample of hundreds of billions of impressions monitored in real time.

The MAQ tracks the frequency and severity of ad quality issues as experienced by the real victims of malicious, disruptive and annoying ads: end users.

The MAQ Index, which leverages Confiant’s position as the vendor of choice for ad security, quality, and privacy monitoring, aims to provide a comprehensive view into the creative issues facing the industry.

In 2018, Confiant released the industry’s first benchmark report. This report, the 20th in the series, covers the first half of 2024.

Highlights

• One in every 454 impressions was a user security risk.
• Firefox’s security violation rate has consistently increased since 2022.
• Google maintains a security violation rate of almost 1%.
• SSP-S holds onto the worst quality block rate, almost double that of the second worst SSP.
• SSP-H underperformed in both security and quality violation rates, the first time since 2021.
• The SSPs with the most security incidents continue to have the fastest response times.
• Fake Updates were the most consistent threat in H1 2024.