Google acquires London start-up Spider.io to help crack down on advertising fraud

The company was bought for an undisclosed sum

The spree of takeovers in the global technology industry continued today as Google announced it is snapping up London firm Spider.io to help it fight advertising fraud.

The three-year-old company specialises in tackling online ad fraud, estimated to cost companies an estimated £6 billion each year. Spider.io identifies programmes that defraud advertisers through false traffic and other means, notably discovering the Chameleon botnet that was costing advertisers £4 million a month.

Google today announced it has bought Spider.io for an undisclosed sum, praising the company’s “world-class ad fraud fighting operation”.

Announcing the deal in a blog post, Google’s vice president of display advertising Neal Mohan said: “By including Spider.io’s fraud fighting expertise in our products, we can scale our efforts to weed out bad actors and improve the entire digital ecosystem.

“Our immediate priority is to include their fraud detection technology in our video and display ads products, where they will complement our existing efforts.”

The deal is the latest in a string of takeover deals in the tech industry. Last month Google paid £400 million for London-based artificial intelligence start-up DeepMind and last week WhatsApps was snapped up by Facebook for $19 billion.

Based in the West End, Spider.io was founded by Dr Douglas de Jager, who describes himself as a “poacher turned gamekeeper” on the company’s website.

De Jager previously founded BytePlay, which specialised in so-called “content scraping”, a practice that uses programmes to collect specific information from websites and is related to web automation, which simulates human browsing using computer software.

Spider.io’s seven employees will now join Google.