What if a third of programmatic ad spend turns out to be bots?
A 30%-bot programmatic audit collapses CPMs and trust across the open web, hitting SSP/DSP and open-web publisher revenue — a real adtech-complex shock, not single-name. Rhymes with the Methbot/3ve fraud exposes that dented programmatic confidence and shifted budgets. Forward angle: dollars don't leave digital, they migrate to verified walled gardens and retail media — so Meta/Amazon are relative winners while The Trade Desk and open exchanges wear the CPM hit.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Forensic audit reveals 30% of programmatic spend is bot traffic, collapsing trust and CPMs across the open web. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.