Case study - Newsletter platform
beehiiv is the fastest growing platform for content creators, and its scale made its ad network a target. After integrating Omnivery's Bot Detection API, beehiiv saved advertisers $14.4 million in fraudulent ad spend in six months.
Published 2025
The results
beehiiv is the fastest growing platform for content creators, empowering them to monetize their audiences. It sends over 3 billion emails a month and generates tens of millions of clicks.
Its monetization model is what makes engagement data financially load-bearing. When advertisers pay against clicks in a newsletter ad network, a click that came from a machine is a payment for something that did not happen.
With over 3 billion emails sent monthly and tens of millions of clicks generated, beehiiv's scale quickly became a magnet for abuse. Fraudulent accounts and bot-driven click activity posed a direct threat to ad network integrity and revenue.
"Fraudulent signups and bot attacks are a never-ending challenge. Bad actors ultimately aim to monetize, and that puts our ad network - and our entire platform - at risk."
Tyler Denk, CEO, beehiiv
beehiiv attempted to address the problem in-house but found that detecting non-human interactions at scale was far more complex than expected.
"We were successful in identifying some bots, but our detection rates weren't where they needed to be."
Jacob Wolf, Senior Solutions Engineer, beehiiv
Rule-based filtering catches the obvious cases - a known datacenter IP range, an implausible user agent - and misses the rest. The bots that matter commercially are the ones built to look like people.
In late 2024 beehiiv began evaluating Omnivery's newly released Bot Detection API, a tool built on eight years of development and proprietary email behavior data.
"beehiiv was one of the first platforms to pilot our BotDetection API. The nature and scale of the abuse they faced gave us valuable feedback to further refine the product's accuracy and integration experience."
Jakub Olexa, CEO, Omnivery
The integration is a data one rather than a delivery one. beehiiv continues to run its own sending; engagement events are submitted to the Bot Detection API, which classifies each interaction as human or non-human and, where non-human, distinguishes benign automation from malicious activity. Nothing is blocked, no CAPTCHA is shown and no interaction is suppressed - the API returns a verdict and beehiiv decides what to do with it.
For an ad network the two categories carry different consequences. Benign automation, such as a security scanner following every link in a message, inflates engagement without any intent to defraud. Malicious activity is a deliberate attempt to extract payment. Discarding both as "bot traffic" would hide the fraud problem inside a measurement problem.
beehiiv processes over 60 million engagements per month through Omnivery's Bot Detection API. Of those, 30% are identified as non-human, and over 66% of that non-human activity is deemed malicious rather than benign automation.
Over six months, that screening saved $14.4 million in fraudulent ad spend. The savings go directly to advertisers, which increases trust in beehiiv's ecosystem and, in turn, the revenue opportunity for legitimate publishers.
That 66% share is what distinguishes a monetized platform. In most senders' data the majority of non-human interaction is benign - security gateways, inbox tools, Apple Mail Privacy Protection prefetching images. On a monetized platform the mix inverts, because there is money to extract. A platform that assumes its bot traffic is mostly harmless scanners will misjudge its exposure.
"Stopping every bad actor is impossible. Omnivery's partnership and technology allows us to stay far ahead."
Mariska Calabrese, Senior Manager of Information Security, beehiiv
For a platform whose revenue depends on engagement being real, screening it is not a back-office function. beehiiv now returns verified engagement data to the advertisers buying against it.
At a glance
The Bot Detection API is available to platforms and ESPs as well as to Omnivery sending customers, subject to vetting. The State of Email Bots 2026 sets out what the wider data looks like.