Diwanee Fights Ad Fraud & Content Theft With DataDome

No more content theft

Valid, verifiable advertising traffic data

Server load reduced by 10-15%

Media & entertainment Scraping

Founded in Beirut in 2009, Diwanee is a publisher of e-commerce and content sites for Middle Eastern and especially Saudi Arabian women. In 2014, the French group Webedia acquired a majority stake in the company, which today employs close to 300 people. Diwanee’s mission is to engage its audience with original, high quality and trusted content, focused on beauty, fashion, food, family, and entertainment.

Every month, the company’s five websites attract 11 million visitors, who generate 25 million page views and 100 million video views. We spoke to Ivan Petrovic, Chief Scientist at Diwanee and one of the company’s four co-founders.

The challenge: Content theft & ad fraud

Like so many other digital media sites, Diwanee found itself the target of scraper bots stealing their content.

The team discovered that the recipes they published on the cooking site Atyab Tabkha, which is very popular in the region, appeared a few days later on competing sites. Other contents were also scraped and republished without permission.

The second indicator of illicit activity was a significant discrepancy between the advertising traffic data that Diwanee registered on its own sites, and the data coming from the trackers that the company installs on its advertisers’ sites. The reason: fraudulent traffic distorting the campaigns.

A less scrupulous publisher might have welcomed this additional traffic flow (and the corresponding revenue). But since its beginning, Diwanee has opted for transparency. For Ivan Petrovic, sending customers automated, illegitimate traffic is unacceptable.

The solution: Cleaning up site traffic by filtering bots

Like most users of the DataDome solution, Diwanee initially tried to manually block malevolent IP addresses. But the conclusion was quickly drawn: it was unmanageable.

“They change all the time, it’s really too much effort. And besides, it’s not a priority for us to manage bot traffic internally, it’s not our core business,” observes Ivan Petrovic.

Since the Webedia group was already using the DataDome technology for protection against bad bots, the solution was a natural choice for Diwanee’s team as well.

“The deployment went extremely well. The solution integrated seamlessly into our architecture, and I got nothing but positive feedback from my team regarding the implementation. There were really zero problems,” he affirms.

The solution’s performance also satisfied the team, as they observed no difference in query resolution time. Indeed, the latency between DataDome’s servers and the module installed on Diwanee’s sites is in the range of a few milliseconds.

The results: Content protection, performance improvements, & cost savings

So in which ways has Diwanee benefited from deploying the DataDome solution?

“First of all, the solution has enabled us to put an end to the theft of our content. We’ve taken back control over the distribution of our articles, our recipes and our videos. This problem is completely resolved,” comments Ivan Petrovic.

“Secondly, all the traffic we send to our advertisers is now legitimate, and the numbers we give them are valid and verifiable,” he continues. “We have always had a very transparent policy vis-à-vis our customers. The local advertising market continuously making better use of data and becoming more attentive to campaign ROI, so being able to guarantee the legitimacy of our traffic reassures advertisers and enhances our credibility.”

Finally, Mr. Petrovic was pleasantly surprised by the decrease in server load, even though this was not initially one of his main objectives.

Certain bots were hitting hundreds of thousands of pages a day, and indeed, being able to block them is very beneficial. We’re no longer using 10-15% of our infrastructure resources for nothing. Our sites are faster and better performing, and our hosting fees are lower.

Ivan Petrovic, Chief Scientist at Diwanee

To conclude, we asked Mr. Petrovic how he uses the DataDome solution in his day-to-day work.

“I look at the daily email report, which is very useful and enables me to get a quick overview without using the dashboard. Once a month, we review the lists of commercial bots and bad bots to make sure we don’t block any bots that should be allowed. But apart from that, I’m not doing anything. I like solutions that run in the background and that I don’t need to think about. I’m confident!”