Meet the new scourge: bots. According to new research from the ANA, or the Association of National Advertisers, bot fraud could mean up to a $6.3 billion loss for marketers in 2015. Those are big numbers and a cause for concern.

As it turns out, almost a quarter of video ads are actually served to bots and not real human beings. Display ads, while much derided for being the victims of “banner blindness,” are not as affected with 11 percent of them being “bot-infected.”

Unsurprisingly, this issue is a big one for programmatic, especially as it grows to become the future of ad buying. Not exactly a vote of confidence for programmatic, which is predicted to expand 3x its current dominion by 2018.

“For 18 of the 36 study participants, three well-known programmatic ad exchanges supplied programmatic traffic with over 90 percent bots,” says the report.

The scope of the problem is quite big. The report shows that up to 50 percent of publisher activity could be coming from bots. As a result, some publishers are now setting up their own ad exchanges.