This morning I opened my email to read through my daily intake of media.

(proceed with shock and awe)

I am subscribed to a quality email newsletter from Beet.TV.  Andy Plesser, the Executive Producer of Beet, has done a great job in building a relative and informative site, focused on online video news.

Normally I am quiet, but today the post read, “Heavy.com Is Among 10 Fastest Growing Sites, comScore”. It made me cringe. Coming out of the video industry I had heard stories on the practices of Heavy.

I took the time, at one point, to see for myself. Essentially, months ago I wrote an article on how to manipulate comScore. I hinted that you could buy fake traffic and blend it to disguise your dirty deed. Fortunately, media buyers who know better can still discover.

After seeing that article I ventured to their Quantcast, which they blocked, and seemingly killed pixel tracking with. So I went to the next great thing, Google Website Trends.

The top referring sites looked good, up until I came to the bottom. While I ventured to the sites, which actually looked like they had crap traffic, I found the last one was a porn portal, “hornyteens4you.net”, which indicates that someone is buying cheap fake traffic.

I tend not to call people out, but in this case I have to.

Heavy.com, shame on you! The act of buying fake traffic to serve against ads is totally inappropriate. It is what suppresses CPM’s and campaign performance.

Andy, your site does great reporting, but I have to call this one out.

To verify this on your own, simply pull a Hitwise report, and verify it for yourself. Also look at the “also visited” or “similar audience” site traffic, and you can see that its just being washed to clean up the domains.

Happy media buying.

Brad