Pre-roll on a news site
A reader clicks an article video. Behind the scenes, six systems coordinate in under 300ms.
User clicks play
Browser instantiates an HTML5 video player with IMA SDK. The player reads the page's VAST tag URL from the publisher's config.
When this breaks
Failure modes operators actually see. Tap one to read trigger, symptom, recovery, blast radius — then replay it in the sandbox to watch the message flow change.
Reshuffle for more — each fact links to its source.
Methbot (2016) faked roughly $5M/day of pre-roll inventory via 800+ data-center servers running headless Chrome — the largest video ad-fraud bust on record at the time.
Forbes was caught in 2023 running a hidden video player (`forbes.com/connect/`) selling roughly $40M/yr of pre-roll inventory advertisers thought was on the main site.
The New York Times dropped 3rd-party programmatic in the EU after GDPR (2018) and direct-sold pre-roll revenue went up, not down.