DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. (DoubleVerify) operates a media effectiveness platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to drive superior outcomes for global brands.
By creating more effective, transparent ad transactions, the company makes the digital advertising ecosystem stronger, safer, and more secure, thereby preserving the fair value exchange between buyers and sellers of digital media. As the global digital advertising market has evolved, the company has continued to expand its c...
DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. (DoubleVerify) operates a media effectiveness platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to drive superior outcomes for global brands.
By creating more effective, transparent ad transactions, the company makes the digital advertising ecosystem stronger, safer, and more secure, thereby preserving the fair value exchange between buyers and sellers of digital media. As the global digital advertising market has evolved, the company has continued to expand its capabilities through new product innovation and partnerships across emerging programmatic media buying platforms and digital media channels, including social and CTV.
The advertising industry continues to shift from traditional mediums to an expanding array of digital channels and platforms. Digital advertisers have historically relied on inconsistent, self-reported data from a large number of publishers, social channels and programmatic platforms, making it difficult to form an accurate, unbiased view of how and where their ad budgets are spent. As objectionable content and ad fraud have proliferated across the Internet and other digital channels, advertisers are utilizing independent, third-party solutions to protect their brand equity and optimize the performance of their digital media investments.
The company’s technology addresses this need by providing unbiased data analytics that enable advertisers to increase the effectiveness, quality and return on their digital advertising investments. The company’s proprietary DV Authentic Ad metric is its definitive metric of digital media quality, which measures whether a digital ad is displayed in a fraud-free, brand-suitable environment and is fully viewable in the intended geography. The company’s software platform delivers this metric to its customers in real time, allowing them to access critical performance data on their digital ads. Customers then leverage its data analytics to improve the efficiency of their digital advertising investments by avoiding wasted media spend on blocked or fraudulent ads and to optimize their media strategies in real time by verifying their highest performing ads and content.
The company’s software platform is integrated across the entire digital advertising ecosystem, including programmatic platforms, social media channels and digital publishers. The company delivers unique data analytics through its customer interface, DV Pinnacle, to provide detailed insights into its customers’ media performance on both direct and programmatic media buying platforms and across all key digital media channels (including social, video, mobile in-app and connected TV (CTV)), formats (including display and video) and devices (including mobile, desktop and connected televisions). The company collected and analyzed data points on the approximately 8.3 trillion Media Transactions Measured by it in 2024. The company also analyzes more than 21 billion digital ad transactions daily, measuring whether ads are delivered in a fraud-free, brand-suitable environment and are fully viewable in the intended geography. The company’s software platform and unique position in the advertising ecosystem allows it to develop a significant data asset that accumulates over time as it measures an increasing number of media transactions. The company is able to leverage its data asset across its existing solutions, as well as expand the data asset to launch new solutions that address the evolving needs of advertisers.
The company’s blue-chip customer base includes many of the largest global brands. The company serves over 2,000 customers that are diversified across all major industry verticals, including consumer packaged goods, financial services, telecommunications, technology, automotive and healthcare. In 2024, the company had 110 customers. In addition to locations in which the company has a remote or contracted workforce, it serves its customers globally through its offices or commercial operations in 31 locations across 25 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Germany and the United Arab Emirates.
The company generates revenue from its advertising customers based on the volume of media transactions, or ads, that its software platform measures (Media Transactions Measured), for which it receives an analysis fee (Measured Transaction Fee), enabling it to grow as its customers increase their digital ad spend and as it integrates into new channels and platforms. The company has long-term relationships with many of its customers, with an average relationship of approximately eight years for its top 25, 50 and 75 customers, and ongoing contractual agreements with a substantial portion of its customer base. The company is also able to increase revenue per customer as it introduces new solutions, which has resulted in a compounded annual growth rate in average revenue for its top 100 customers of 24% from 2021 to 2024.
Solutions
The DV Authentic Ad
The DV Authentic Ad is the company’s definitive metric of digital media quality, which evaluates the existence of fraud, brand safety and suitability, viewability and geography for each digital ad:
Fraud: The company’s solutions are designed to safeguard advertisers against increasingly sophisticated invalid digital traffic, such as bot fraud, site fraud, malware (including adware), and app fraud. The company continuously monitors and analyzes billions of delivered digital ads on a daily basis for aberrant activity in order to detect new fraud schemes. Each day, the company identifies over 16 million active fraudulent device signatures, distributing them to its partners nearly 100 times per day.
Brand Safety and Suitability: The company’s customers use the data analytics that its software platform provides to target desired contexts and helps prevent their ads from appearing next to content that they do not deem appropriate for their brands. The company’s brand safety and suitability solutions evaluate the full context of a webpage including the URL and the specific content. The company’s approach combines rich content ontology and proprietary artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to appropriately categorize content across over 40 languages. The company offers brands the ability to dynamically configure 100 avoidance categories, such as disasters, news, politics, hate speech and violence, allowing brands to curate environments for their ads to be delivered. Customers can use the company’s extensive content categories to target desired contexts for their ads, without relying on third-party cookies, persistent identifiers or cross-site tracking technology. The company also offers Authentic Brand Suitability, which is an enhanced set of contextual targeting solutions that can be deployed across multiple programmatic platforms.
Viewability: Digital ads are frequently obscured, paused before fully delivered or placed in locations that are out of view from the intended recipient. The company helps its customers determine if their ads are in-view by the recipient of each advertisement by providing advanced viewability metrics, including average time-in-view, key message exposure and video player size. The company’s solutions also leverage its historical data to predict the viewability of ads to optimize programmatic buying decisions.
Geography: Many of the company’s customers run distinct media campaigns that are targeted toward distinct geographic regions. The intended geography of these media campaigns may be specified due to the content or offer of the digital ad, the language in which it is presented or for regulatory and compliance reasons. The company’s customers leverage its solutions to ensure that their geographic targeting requirements are met and that there is language alignment between the digital ad and the intended geographic region.
DV Authentic Attention
DV Authentic Attention is DoubleVerify’s MRC-accredited, privacy-friendly attention measurement solution that provides actionable, comprehensive data to drive campaign performance — from the impact of an ad’s presentation to key dimensions of consumer engagement. Developed in 2020 and released in February 2021, this rich dataset enables granular attention measurement and campaign optimization at scale.
Building on the data the company aggregates to deliver its definitive media quality metric, the DV Authentic Ad, DV Authentic Attention analyzes data points on the exposure of a digital ad and consumer’s engagement with a digital ad and device — in real-time. For exposure, DV Authentic Attention evaluates an ad’s entire presentation, quantifying its intensity and prominence through metrics that include viewable time, share of screen, video presentation, audibility, and more. For engagement, DV Authentic Attention analyzes key user-initiated events that occur while the ad creative is exposed, including user touches, screen orientation, video playback, and audio control interactions. Exposure and Engagement ladder up into the DV Attention Index, an overarching measure of attention that provides key insights into campaign performance. The company’s customers use DV Authentic Attention to predict which ads will impact consumers and drive outcomes, enabling them to make changes to their media strategies in real time.
Custom Contextual
In late 2020, the company launched its Custom Contextual solution to enhance its programmatic advertising solutions. Advertisers use the company’s Custom Contextual solution to match their ads to relevant content in order to maximize user engagement and drive optimal campaign performance. Custom Contextual metrics leverage its content-derived analytics data and are not reliant on third-party cookies or cross-site tracking technology. Custom Contextual enables advertisers to target audiences based on key points of interest even in web browsers and operating systems that have phased out or ended the use of third-party tracking technology, and also positions them to align with existing privacy regulations.
Scibids AI
In August 2023, the company acquired Scibids Technology SAS (Scibids), a global leader in AI-powered digital campaign optimization. The company’s Scibids AI solution empowers global brands to leverage Demand-Side Platform impression-level data, first-party data, measurement data and cost data in order to build algorithmic models that more effectively drive specific key performance indicators and tangible outcomes while improving operational efficiency and reducing manual lift. Scibids AI technology does not rely on digital identifiers, such as cookies and can be activated across leading Demand-Side Platforms, such as The Trade Desk, DV360, and Xandr.
Supply-Side Solutions
The company provides its software solutions and data analytics to publishers and other supply-side customers to enable them to maximize revenue from their digital advertising inventory. Supply-side advertising platforms (such as ad networks and exchanges) utilize its data analytics to validate the quality of their ad inventory and provide metrics to their customers to facilitate the targeting and purchasing of digital ads. The company also provides the DV Publisher Suite, a unified solution for digital publishers to manage revenue and increase inventory yield by improving video delivery, identifying lost or unfilled sales, and better aggregate data across all inventory sources.
Customer Interface
DV Pinnacle allows the company’s customers to adjust and deploy controls for their media plan and track campaign performance metrics across channels, formats and devices.
Profile and Controls: DV Pinnacle allows brands to set profiles and adjust controls for their media plan’s verification settings which are then consistently and automatically deployed across all of an advertiser’s digital buying channels. The company’s customers use DV Pinnacle to configure their Authentic Brand Suitability settings, such as inclusion/exclusion lists, override lists, custom keyword avoidance, inappropriate content avoidance categories, as well as app brand suitability controls, such as filtering by app category, star reviews and age ratings. These settings are then automatically uploaded into the company’s customers’ programmatic platforms for complete synchronicity between their pre bid and post purchase measurement settings.
Analytics: DV Pinnacle enables advertisers to gain a clear understanding of the quality and effectiveness of their digital media campaigns and allows them to take appropriate actions for campaign optimization. DV Pinnacle generates industry benchmarks that are dynamically refreshed enabling customers to compare the quality of their ads against their peers and allows users to set specific thresholds on key performance indicators that drive success of the media campaign, such as blocking rates, ad delivery and viewability.
Integration and Channel Partnerships
The company’s technology is integrated with leading digital advertising technology channels, supporting the distribution of its programmatic solutions and enabling it to analyze a broad footprint of data and deliver a comprehensive analysis for its customers. These digital ecosystem integrations are highly complex, requiring significant time and capital to develop, and they are a key driver of its success by creating highly scalable network effects. The company’s position as a strong, independent analytics partner has enabled it to integrate with key global platforms, including social channels, many of whom are very selective in granting third parties’ access to their technology environments. As new media formats emerge, the strength of its solutions and the flexibility of its software platform allows it to efficiently onboard new integration partners and secure new partnerships as selling channels for its solutions. Further, as it builds new product sets, these flexible integrations and partnerships allow for seamless distribution of new services on existing partner platforms. The company maintains a team of dedicated business development professionals who manage existing partnerships and develop new channels.
Select integration and channel partners include:
Demand-Side Platforms: Amazon, Google, The Trade Desk, Yahoo, Nexxen, Infillion, Adobe, and Xandr.
Ad Platforms and Exchanges: Line Yahoo, Magnite, Teads, Epsilon, Nexxen, LG Ads, Taboola, and Criteo.
Ad Servers and Ratings/Workflow Platforms: Innovid, Google and MediaOcean Prisma.
Social Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok.
CTV: Amazon, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and Roku.
The company’s advertising customers often purchase its solutions through a Demand-Side Platform. Demand-Side Platforms have technology to manage an advertiser’s bidding process on exchanges that facilitate the buying and selling of advertising inventory from multiple advertising networks. Customers leverage the company’s solutions on Demand-Side Platforms to enable the advertiser to evaluate the quality of advertising inventory up for bid on an advertising exchange. To make the company’s solutions available to advertiser customers through a Demand-Side Platform, the company enters into agreements with programmatic partners that allow its technology to be integrated into the Demand-Side Platform and enable customers to access its solutions through the platform. Under the terms of these agreements with Demand-Side Platforms, the programmatic partner collects fees from the company’s advertiser customers and remits them to the company. Because the company advertisers’ customers obtain control its solutions to inform their purchasing decision, rather than the programmatic partners providing access to the Demand-Side Platform, the company records revenue for the gross amounts paid by its advertiser customers for these company-provided solutions, and the amounts retained by the programmatic partners are recorded by the company as a cost of sales.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Support
The company’s go-to-market strategy for new customers focuses on driving awareness for its solutions and fostering relationships with senior brand executives and Chief Marketing Officers of leading brands, agencies and publishers. The company’s sales presentation focuses on the market challenges that it addresses, the benefits that customers have achieved utilizing its solutions and the product innovation and differentiation that drive its superior results. The company targets the largest global advertisers and that it offers the most comprehensive suite of solutions available in the market.
The company’s commercial organization is aligned by geographically focused teams, comprising sales and account management professionals in the Americas, EMEA and APAC; and professionals dedicated to global client and agency relationships. The company regularly seeks to expand into new geographies based on demand from existing customers and the attractiveness of the potential market opportunity.
The company’s sales professionals are responsible for driving the overall commercial strategy, establishing early connections and maintaining relationships with large, blue-chip brands and global advertising agencies and expanding its existing customer relationships. The company’s customer support team handles all aspects of customer relationships from pre-sale technical support to client onboarding, training and implementation of its solutions. Account managers work closely with product managers to provide direct customer feedback, which is also shared with the company’s technology and development organization, enabling them to implement ongoing improvements and identify potential new product categories.
The company’s marketing team’s objectives are to build brand leadership globally, drive sales empowerment through lead generation and top-of-funnel pipeline growth, and support customer retention and up-sell through industry insights, thought leadership and analysis of customer data. The company executes this strategy through frequent publications of industry insight reports, whitepapers, case studies, earned media, participation at industry conferences and frequent engagement with the world’s leading brands.
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 506 professionals on its Commercial organization teams, of which 214 were sales professionals, 53 were marketing professionals and 239 were account managers and customer support representatives.
Product Development
The company’s product development expenses were $153.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Competition
Ad platform partners that offer their own measurement and performance solutions for ads placed through their ad buying tools, such as The Trade Desk, Meta and Google, as well as other digital ad measurement providers, including Integral Ad Science, Scope3, Zefr, Nielson, Comscore and Protected Media constitute the company’s primary competitors.
Seasonality
The company experiences fluctuations in revenue that coincide with seasonal fluctuations in the digital ad spending of its customers. Advertisers typically allocate the largest portion of their media budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year (year ended December 2024) in order to coincide with increased holiday purchasing. As a result, the fourth quarter of the year typically reflects the company’s highest level of measurement activity while the first quarter reflects the lowest level of such activity.
Intellectual Property
The company has three registered U.S. patents, six international patents (four in Europe and two in Japan) and four pending patent applications. The company also holds various service marks, trademarks and trade names, including DoubleVerify, its logo design, DV Authentic Ad, DV Authentic Attention, DV Pinnacle, Authentic Brand Safety and Authentic Brand Suitability, that it deems important to its business. The company has over 20 registered U.S. trademarks and approximately 15 trademarks that it has registered in various jurisdictions abroad.
History
DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2008. The company was incorporated in 2017.
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