Amid all of the headlines about ad fraud comes some reasonably good news, for a change: Both malicious ads and surreptitious in-banner video ads were down significantly in this year’s second quarter.

That’s according to Confiant’s Demand Quality Report for the period. The real-time ad-quality verification vendor tracks the quality of programmatic advertising on an ongoing basis, using a normalized sample of more than 120 billion impressions.

Malicious ads — defined as creative that includes (usually obfuscated) Javascript that spawns a forced redirect or loads a secondary or tertiary payload for similar malicious purposes — fell to 0.25%. That’s down from 0.39% in Q1, and a high of 0.54% in Q4 2018.

“There continues to be a huge gap between the best and worst performers,” adds the report. “Among top SSPs, the worst performer is over 60 times as likely to deliver a malicious ad as the best performer.”

Also, weekends and holidays continue to experience a higher rate of incidents. The rate of malicious ads by day ranges from a low of 0.13% on Thursdays to a high on 0.44% on Sundays, by a factor of more than three times.

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