Yes and no. TV audiences were measured through surveys. You have margins of error and some percentage of viewers going to the bathroom, but by and large, you we

Yes and no. TV audiences were measured through surveys. You have margins of error and some percentage of viewers going to the bathroom, but by and large, you were paying for placement in a show with 500k viewers. Some of them wouldn't see it, but you're getting what you paid for. The rampant fraud we're talking about involves making a fake website (or taking a real one and hot-swapping its ad code) pointing a farm of devices at it and tricking the analytics services AND the buyers into thinking they were put in front of the audience of 500k people, give or take, when 0 of them are human. The only way a scam like this works is because the ads are sold by robots, bought by robots, and measured by robots in lots of small batches, so a person can't just look at the site on their laptop and confirm that their ads are running even if they wanted to.