Rich Kahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Anura, has been a leader in the online advertising industry since 1993. In 2003, he founded eZanga.com, a digital marketing company specializing in pay-per-click and pay-per-call advertising. His comments have appeared in various publications and has been named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

MEDIA 7: Please take us on your career journey. How did you come up with the idea of ​​Anura?
Rich Kahn: I started my first career in Internet Marketing in 1993. While I was so fascinated by what the internet can do, I created a newsletter that shared all of what I learned about the new tool. As the newsletter grew, my readers would be asking questions about the ads in my newsletter, which sparked my first digital marketing company.

In an effort to grow my audience, I bought a list of “optional” email users from an Internet company, but ultimately it turned into a fraud. As a result, this list along with many other issues almost cost me my company. This was my first experience with online fraud.

With the launch of the web browser in late 1994, I quickly saw a whole new direction of where the internet is going. Technologies were being built to make it easy for the average person to take advantage of this wonderful and advanced new technology.
I’ve been involved in all kinds of technology and over the years I’ve developed some of my own. In the late 90’s, I started a company that paid users to browse the web, where I wrote about this company in WIRED magazine. The article found that some of my users use software to make money while not online. To combat this user fraud, I created my first fraud detection software and started my fraud reduction journey.

In the early 2000s, I was an advertiser promoting various offers such as lead generation and e-commerce. However, my return on investment was not where I thought it should be, so I thought there must be something to do with the traffic I bought. After doing some research, I realized that this was a fraud… which I had seen before. This happened around 2005, which prompted me to look for a fraud solution, but nothing. So what does the developer do when there is no solution? We are building one! This was the birth of the Anura solution.

Q7: Can you briefly explain the impact Anura’s platform will have if a company starts to implement it? How will it provide a better return on investment for them?
RK: When our clients first implement Anura, our first goal is to establish the basis for fraud rates. Then we create a game plan to effectively reduce and eliminate fraud. On average, we find 25% scams with new customers, but Anura saw extremes far above that figure. Our ultimate goal is to create a plan for them to use our data while maintaining or growing their overall volume while cutting the fraud rate in half. When we reach that goal, we’ve set another goal to halve it again, usually within a few weeks. The lower the fraud rates, the higher the investment returns. If they are selling this traffic, their customers will see an increase in ROI and will want to spend more with them as the traffic is more valuable.

Think of it this way, when you remove the fraudulent traffic correctly (which never actually converts), your return on investment will increase. If ROI increases, customer demand increases. When customer demand increases, your company grows!
Finally, when we bring the fraud rate to a reasonable level, our customers can surgically reduce each fraudulent visitor by using our real-time signals to make real-time decisions, one of the many benefits of our solution.

Q7: Are there any difficulties you face in using and maintaining such an advanced platform?
RK: Absolutely! Fraud has become a $ 42 billion problem as of 2019, and is expected to rise to over $ 100 billion in the next few years. With this extreme growth, more and more people are entering the game of fraud and learning how to get a share of this multi-billion dollar industry. This means that more and more skilled fraudsters are entering the field and creating unique malicious attacks on the web.

Over the last 16 years, we have developed a very specific process that will help us identify new anomalies in the billions of processes we see every day. This helps us tackle all new fraud attacks coming from the internet. The challenge we face is that fraud evolves on a daily basis and we spend substantial amounts on a continuous basis.Resources tackling new fraud attacks to protect our customers.

M7: What is the resource (websites, newsletters, etc.) you can refer to that will help you stay up to date with the facts in the world of Ad Fraud?
RK: To be honest, what we’re learning is not something you will find on any website, newsletter or social media. Our sources to be used are the data we collect in our customer base. Combining data with our own machine learning and experienced engineering team gives us what we need to be aware of advertising fraud and protect our customers.

M7: Your podcasts are extremely informative. How do you manage to strike a balance between business and other such commitments?
RK: It’s not easy to tackle all of the work we need to do while spending time on podcasts and blogs to educate the general population on ad fraud. We believe it is very helpful to invest our scam findings publicly this time around, as this issue is unfamiliar to many but can also be a victim. In some cases, we can help companies like Google, find large amounts of fraud on their networks, and provide them with tools to prevent it. A few years ago Anura published a whitepaper on the biggest fraud find in history… over $ 3 billion a year for fraud. We gave detailed analysis to Google and they were able to block fraudulent apps. We

We all think it’s a win for the good guys! Combining data with our own machine learning and experienced engineering team gives us what we need to be aware of advertising fraud and protect our customers. 7: What are the main advertising and marketing tools you use to increase brand awareness? company?
RK: We focused heavily on content marketing to educate the public about fraud and also build brand awareness. We also like to use various digital advertising channels to market our services to people in the market for a solution. Like most, we use our social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to post our latest content and updates. However, our favorite channel to use is industry trade shows, so we can give such an advanced product a human touch. Also, nothing can replace face-to-face interactions. Unfortunately, due to COVID, commercial shows are on hold for now, but we hope we will return to them in the next few months.

M7: The best advice you’ve ever received?
RK: A good friend of mine, a serial entrepreneur, a while ago gave me vital advice he uses in each of his businesses. “As the owner of your business, you need to talk directly to your customers and listen to what they have to say,” he said.

After all, they are users of your product / service and generally know more about it than most of your employees. Let’s face it, your company is growing thanks to your customers and they are ready to pay for your product / service to solve a problem in their company so that they can be successful. Your customers tend to provide valuable feedback (both positive and negative) about your product or service to best suit their wishes and needs as your customers.

Throughout my career, I have created many successful customer oriented platforms. I used this recommendation for all the platforms I created, and I got great user feedback as I always listen to my customers.

ABOUT ANURA

Anura.io is the best of its kind ad fraud detection solution. Anura is designed to allow our customers to identify and remove fraud in their campaigns so that they can see an instant increase in quality traffic and performance in real time. We are able to allow our customers to experience tremendous growth with our product, reduce fraud, TCPA violations, and ultimately reinvest in themselves and thrive as companies by increasing conversions and revenue. Unlike most SaaS-based solutions that update their systems quarterly or less, Anura.io is constantly evolving by using artificial intelligence and machine learning together. Rather than adding more “bells and whistles”, our development team spends their days maneuvering the evolving tactics fraudsters use to find solutions in place; Therefore, it is very important for us to continuously improve our product.