oh wow, thanks for submitting our research! So, we've essentially found that free mobile games engage in a form of traffic arbitrage by making users load entire websites that are ad monetized in order to earn in-game currency. This is considered invalid traffic (IVT) in the digital advertising industry.

The bit that HN may find interesting is that when entire web pages are embedded in a webview like that, the verification javascript embedded in the ads that are present on the page cannot (sometimes at all) realize that they are within a webview. Making this traffic seem totally organic.

What's worse, recently we found that a major podcast network was autoplaying podcasts in order to juice their numbers for all their shows using this rewarded traffic scheme, and again, nearly impossible to verify on the other end.

There's a lot of interesting technology challenges to solve in the ad-tech space because let's be honest, it's pretty rough and privacy hostile.