UP541 Addicted To Fake Fan Numbers: When Sport Met The Dead Internet

Digital advertising has a dirty secret: most of what you're paying for never reaches a human being. Dr. Augustine Fou is a world leading expert in digital ad fraud and has spent 20 years watching the internet fill up with bots, fake impressions, and dodgy metrics; and the advertisers funding it often know, but keep spending anyway. The incentives are too comfortable to disturb.

Sound familiar? Sport has built valuation models, rights deals, and global expansion strategies on fan numbers that deserve the same scrutiny. This conversation is about the mechanics of self-deception, and why the moment of reckoning may finally be arriving.

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