https://youtu.be/FC5v2Z3-Lx8 Rich Kahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Anura, is driven by a mission to help businesses grow by eliminating digital ad fraud that silently siphons marketing budgets. A lifelong entrepreneur and developer, Rich is passionate about ensuring that advertising dollars reach real users—not bots, malware, or human fraud. We explore Rich’s journey from launching an early digital advertising platform to uncovering widespread fraud that threatened his own business—and how building an internal solution eventually led to Anura. Rich breaks down his Ad Optimization Framework—Minimize Fraud, Optimize Conversion, Refresh Content—and explains why fraud must be addressed before any meaningful optimization can occur. He also shares how ad fraud impacts ROI, why lifetime value matters more than cost-per-click, and the conviction required to build and scale a SaaS company in a crowded market. — Improve Traffic Quality by 25% Overnight with Rich Kahn Good day, dear listeners. My name is Steve Preda, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and the creator of the Summit OS Business Operating System. And today, my guest isa Rich Kahn, the CEO and Co-founder of Anura, an ad fraud solution that monitors traffic to identify real users versus bots, malware, and human fraud. Rich, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me today. Well, it’s super interesting business you have and the entrepreneurial journey. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in Anura? My personal ‘Why’ has always been to help people. Fraud is a huge problem. And it’s no longer a question of if you have fraud, it’s a question of how much fraud you have. And I’m watching people spend millions and millions of dollars on digital marketing and getting it siphoned out by fraudsters with bogus traffic. So the ‘Why’ is that, in all the businesses that I’ve done, I’ve wanted to help people grow their business. I want to help people grow their staff. I wanted to help people grow, just in general. Share on X And in this case, with the Anura, I’m able to help them identify, wasted spend, eliminate that so they can grow their marketing campaigns and grow their company. And if they grow their company, then they have to grow their staff, and it’s a good thing for everybody. Yeah, definitely. And until we talked, I was not aware that fraud is rampant, especially in ad spend. It didn’t occur to me. And I kind of wonder why this is happening. But tell me how you found this problem, and why do you want to solve this, and how did you get to this point to launch a company about it? Well, in 2003, my wife and I launched a digital marketing firm. Think of Google, but really small. So it’s text-based ads you can target by keyword, bid price, geography, audience, like it had all these targeting criteria. We launched it in 2003. By 2004, we had a nice, stable list of clients, but we started getting some complaints about the traffic quality. Something wasn’t right. And I’m a developer, so I started looking at the code and realizing, looking at all the analytics and the data, and realized that it was bad traffic, it was fraudulent traffic. So I figured, you know what? I don't want to solve fraud. I want to go out, buy a fraud solution, bolt it onto my platform, and just continue doing my business. Share on X Kind of like buying McAfee for your laptop. You just buy and let it scan and do its thing. But in 2004, it didn’t exist any fraud solutions. In fact, the first commercial available fraud solution didn’t start selling until 2008 or ’09. So I was a developer, and I said, we’re going to lose our business if I don’t do something. So I figured it out I’d build it myself, and we did. I wrote the software. It worked great. We had to continue evolving it as fraud evolved. And it got to the point where we started having clients ask—if not beg—to use our software outside of our network. And that’s when we kind of got the idea that this might be a good tool to sell by itself, as opposed to baked into our platform. And that’s where we launched it, in 2017. We ended up launching a Anura as a standalone solution. Wow. I mean, it’s definitely, if this is a big problem, it’s going to affect everyone who advertises. So it could be hundreds of millions of people. How can someone even make money with fraudulent traffic? How does it help them to make money? Well, what happens is internet advertising fraud is not illegal. There’s no law that says you can’t do it. So if you do find somebody that’s doing it, it’s really difficult to prosecute them in the U.S. But a lot of it happens overseas, so it’s even worse. There’s a lot of countries that allow all kinds of stuff. So basically, what we focus on is that their job is to try to make money. And I read an article one time from another company that was doing stats on fraud detection. They said the average fraudster—and this is why they do it—makes $5 million a year. But how? There’s a lot of different ways. It depends if they’re buying from Google, Facebook, DSPs, or affiliate marketing. But I’ll give you a simple example. One example, which is affiliate marketing. A lot of companies use affiliate marketing. I think it’s a $20 or $30 billion industry at this point. It’s a big market. So what happens is, right now, you or I can go to Amazon and sign up for their affiliate program, and every time we send them a new client, they’ll give us 5% of what they spend. So I’m getting paid on the spend, right? So what if I sent fake users there? I’m not going to get paid for anything because they’re not spending money. But what if I’m the fraudster? I use stolen credit cards to make those purchases. So if the purchase gets made and shipped, I get 5%. Affiliates usually get paid net 7. So I get paid net 7, somewhere across that month, maybe the next month, the person whose credit card was stolen says, “Hey, wait a second, I recognize charges that don’t belong to me.” And then the investigation starts and takes months before it comes back to Amazon and says, “Oh, you shipped out a product to a fraudulent credit card. You’re not getting paid for this. We’re taking the money back.” But by then, they’ve already shipped the product, so they’re out the hard cost of the product. They’ve already paid out the affiliate. The affiliate has already been paid. The affiliate can continue to do that for weeks, knowing that it’s going to take months for them to get caught. Once they get caught, they just set up another account. And what they’re doing is making those affiliate margins. So if they spend a hundred dollars, they make five. If they create dozens and dozens of accounts, you can quickly see how they can make a lot of money in a short period of time. That’s just one example. Yeah. That’s very interesting. Very interesting. So, okay, that’s really cool. So you basically help people not have the fake traffic. So whatever traffic they have, it’s real. So they pay real prices for real value. That’s got to be a significant improvement in advertising efficiency. What is the kind of improvement that you see on average happening for people? On average, it’s 25% improvement. So 25% of the marketing dollars that they’re spending is fraudulent. Now, if they buy from like Google and Facebook, it’s probably around 10%—they’re on the lower side. If you buy from the programmatic space, like The Trade Desk and things like that, it’s upwards of 50%, and then everything else falls in between. All the digital types of marketing. If you’re doing influencer advertising, if you’re doing affiliate advertising, each one has different levels of fraud that we’ve found. But on the high side is programmatic, and on the low side is probably search and social. Okay, so this seems like a big part of optimizing an ad, and making it perform better. So what I’d like you to share with us—and we’d talked about this in the pre-call is that you have a framework for generally optimizing digital ads. So what would that look like? And one element is fraud, but what are the other elements, and how do you go about optimizing your advertisement? Sure. Like the heaviest hitter, in my opinion, is fraud. So you start with fraud, you look at where fraud is, and you minimize that, right? The next thing you want to focus on is conversion value. Every campaign has some level of conversion. It could be as simple as a click. It could be as simple as watching a video. It could be purchasing a product. It could be generating a lead for, let’s say, Hey, save money on my car insurance, and you fill out a lead. So what you want to do is look at where that conversion takes place. First off, you want to analyze the conversions because not all conversions are real conversions. You’ll get conversions like credit cards, fake credit cards being used, or fake information being used in fill in forms, and that’s where the fraud comes in. Once you eliminate that, now you can rely on the data that you see in your conversion value, and you start optimizing your campaigns around that conversion value. So as long as hey, this source is generating me a 20% conversion, this source is generating me 10%. Guess what? I want to stop spending on the 10%, spend more than the 20% just optimizing for the conversion value. And that's what's going to get your campaign to perform at its highest level. Share on X So what are ways to optimize conversion beyond the fraud piece? Yeah, so once fraud’s out of the game, we’ve eliminated fraud, it’s really focusing on the data. What source you buy the traffic from, what sources they get the traffic from. Because sometimes you might buy a source of traffic like Google, and it may not come from Google. It may
