BuzzCity is undertaking a study with Computer Science researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), to make steps towards safeguarding ad quality across mobile advertising networks.

The CPC (cost per click) model of mobile advertising activity is vulnerable to click fraud, in which site owners clicks on ads that appear on their own site, to boost earnings, whether manually, by altering the codes in an ad tag, or use bot software.

The NUS research teams collaboration with BuzzCity is intended to fight this type of fraud, by using their expertise in informatics to analyse the volume of clickstream data the company provides.

“As mobile traffic and internet advertising grows, click fraud has the potential to diminish the trust of advertisers who otherwise should be getting better returns from their growing mobile budgets,” says BuzzCity CEO KF Lai. “BuzzCity already has a system in place to detect and discard fraudulent clicks before they reach advertisers’ accounts, but we want to ensure that it doesn’t become an issue moving forward.”