For some clarification (as I&#x27;ve worked in the ad industry for years)<p>1) Advertisers (actually their ad agencies) use software called a DSP to connect to ad exchanges and bid on each impression. They have 100-250ms depending on the exchange&#x27;s rules.<p>2) This kind of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is used for both premium space and unsold&#x2F;remnant inventory. The separate &quot;rounds&quot; is going away and there&#x27;s a rapid movement to do a unified auction for each impression with all possible ad buyers (premium to cheap) in a single auction.<p>3) Lots of publishers do actually set a price floor but this is far more complicated than binary yes&#x2F;no for a floor. There&#x27;s a lot of math&#x2F;science put into the online ad auction and yield management space.<p>4) Many networks don&#x27;t use RTB and are safe from this.<p>5) This malware issue isn&#x27;t because of adtech (the tech part) but rather the incentives and lack of regulation and enforcement. Lots of politics and mistrust has required tons of javascript tags just to render a simple banner, and as we all know, js can do just about anything so it immediately gives a bad advertiser power to do whatever they want. This is something being worked on with some newer formats. There&#x27;s also no consequences of &quot;getting caught&quot;. Most ad networks and bad advertisers are not big corporations but little companies in other countries that can just change names and come back in a few days to do it all over again.