The news: Global connected TV (CTV) impression volume grew sharply across every region  DoubleVerify (DV) tracked in 2025, based on billions of DV-protected campaign impressions. 

• Asia-Pacific and Latin America led with 58% YoY growth, followed by North America (52%) and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (35%). 
• Individual standouts included Peru (up 207%), Colombia (196%), the Philippines (140%), Saudi Arabia (119%), and Japan (115%). The UK grew 39%, above the EMEA average but the slowest growth rate of any individually tracked country in the report.

Why it's worth watching: "CTV is becoming an increasingly important part of the video advertising mix alongside desktop, mobile app, and mobile web," DV vice president of marketing Collette Spagnolo told Decision Marketing. She noted that CTV impressions are rising in every market where the company operates.

But fraudsters are scaling right alongside that growth. CTV fraud schemes globally jumped 140% in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025, per DV.  

CTV commands higher CPMs than display, per Next Millennium, making it a more attractive target for fraud operators globally. Fake CTV impressions bring in higher returns than display fraud, allowing even small fraud schemes to scale fast.

• In North America, bot traffic accounts for 82% of violations., while 
• In Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and EMEA, fraud is concentrated in nonhuman data-center traffic, which represents 98%, 91%, and 66% of violations, respectively. 

Advertisers investing in premium video face the same underlying risk of paying for impressions that never reach real viewers, but the fraud threat varies depending on where they're buying.

The solution is not a single global filter but a regional fraud playbook tailored to each market's dominant violation type.

Recommendations for advertisers: Advertisers should continue investing in CTV—a channel that delivers wide reach and engaged viewers globally—but embed verification throughout the  ad buying process to improve the chances of impressions reaching real audiences.

• Verify every impression pre-bid. Require your demand-side platform (DSP) or agency to apply fraud filtering before auctions, not after. With DV data showing fraud variants up 140% YoY globally in Q1,  some post-campaign reporting catches invalid traffic only after budget has been spent.
• Require supply-path optimization from every programmatic partner.  Fewer intermediaries mean fewer opportunities for fraudulent inventory to enter the supply chain.

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