tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post574108606884106297..comments2024-03-28T13:39:27.601-07:00Comments on DSHR's Blog: Even More On The Ad BubbleDavid.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-86835869355426896072022-10-16T15:03:52.135-07:002022-10-16T15:03:52.135-07:00The subhead of Morgan Meaker's How Bots Corrup...The subhead of Morgan Meaker's <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/" rel="nofollow"><i>How Bots Corrupted Advertising</i></a> tells a story I've been writing about since 2017's <a href="https://blog.dshr.org/2017/11/has-web-advertising-jumped-shark.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Has Web Advertising Jumped The Shark? </i></a>:<br /><br />"Botmasters have created a Kafkaesque system where companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots. And everyone is fine with this."<br /><br />Meaker writes:<br /><br />"In June, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), a US industry group, published a blog post that estimated that ad fraud is costing US advertisers $120 billion each year. Hours after it was published, those statements were removed. John Wolfe, the ANA’s director of communications, tells WIRED that the figures were removed because they were out of date, but declines to provide any new figures.<br />...<br />Some companies have taken matters into their own hands. In 2017 Uber <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/19/uber-sues-fetch-for-ad-fraud.html" rel="nofollow">sued</a> one of its advertising agencies for charging it for ads that were not seen by real people or placed on real websites. The case started when Uber <a href="https://which-50.com/how-uber-learned-it-had-a-huge-ad-fraud-problem/" rel="nofollow">pulled all online advertising</a> and discovered barely any drop in app installs or sales."<br /><br />My posts on this topic are <a href="https://blog.dshr.org/search/label/advertising" rel="nofollow">here</a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-58102884343944451162021-06-21T12:47:49.819-07:002021-06-21T12:47:49.819-07:00In Google Is Dominating This Hidden Market With No...In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/opinion/google-monopoly-regulation-antitrust.html" rel="nofollow"><i>Google Is Dominating This Hidden Market With No Rules</i></a>, Dina Srinivasan argues that:<br /><br />"In my scholarly work, I have <a href="https://law.stanford.edu/publications/why-google-dominates-advertising-markets/" rel="nofollow">found</a> that Google has been able to corner much of the ad market and keep trading costs high for websites, apps and advertisers. Now, I am a paid consultant for the team of lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178988/google-antitrust-ad-tech-lawsuit-texas-attorney-general-paxton" rel="nofollow">antitrust suit</a> against Google focused on its ad-market practices. But given the grinding and unpredictable pace of litigation, I believe that we need a faster, more robust solution.<br />...<br />Lawmakers could solve these problems by giving a federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission the power to police conflicts of interest and pass rules against self-dealing in emerging exchange markets like advertising."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-89828146450067708662021-01-04T08:36:42.375-08:002021-01-04T08:36:42.375-08:00Augustine Fou's When Big Brands Stopped Spendi...Augustine Fou's <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-big-brands-stopped-spending-on-digital-ads-nothing-happened-why/" rel="nofollow"><i>When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?</i></a> is yet another explanation of the uselessness of most digital ads:<br /><br />"When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes [1]. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes [2]. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs [3]. When big brands stopped spending on digital ads, nothing happened. Even further back in time, in 2012, eBay turned off their paid search ad spending, and saw NO CHANGE in sales coming from those sources [4]."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-74624517036896623522020-12-25T06:39:13.763-08:002020-12-25T06:39:13.763-08:00It isn't just Facebook's targeting that in...It isn't just Facebook's targeting that insiders think is "crap". Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac report that <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-apple-fight-self-serving" rel="nofollow"><i>Facebook Says It’s Standing Up Against Apple For Small Businesses. Some Of Its Employees Don’t Believe It.</i></a>:<br /><br />"But while the $750 billion company’s public relations effort has presented a united front with small businesses, some Facebook employees complained about what they called a self-serving campaign that bordered on hypocrisy, according to internal comments and audio of a presentation to workers that were obtained by BuzzFeed News. A change in Apple’s iOS 14 mobile operating system — which requires iPhone owners to opt in to allow companies to track them across other apps and websites — hurts Facebook, some employees argued on the company’s private message boards, and their employer was just using small businesses as a shield.<br /><br />“It feels like we are trying to justify doing a bad thing by hiding behind people with a sympathetic message,” one engineer wrote in response to an internal post about the campaign from Dan Levy, Facebook’s vice president for ads."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-74064144901955284512020-12-25T06:33:07.579-08:002020-12-25T06:33:07.579-08:00Ii isn't just outsiders arguing that Facebook&...Ii isn't just outsiders arguing that Facebook's product isn't worth what they charge. Sam Biddle's <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-small-business/" rel="nofollow"><i>Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting in Unsealed Remarks</i></a> reports that:<br /><br />"according to allegations in <a href="http://www.wohlfruchter.com/cases/facebook-inc" rel="nofollow">recently unsealed court documents</a>, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent.<br /><br />The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time they were shown and that data behind a targeting criterion was “all crap.”David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-72345900528434475402020-11-28T09:40:57.667-08:002020-11-28T09:40:57.667-08:00The Economist violates Betteridge's Law with t...<i>The Economist</i> violates <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">Betteridge's Law</a> with their headline <a href="https://www.economist.com/business/2020/11/28/is-the-attention-economy-being-captured-by-virtual-eyeballs" rel="nofollow"><i>Is the attention economy being captured by virtual eyeballs?</i></a>. The story starts:<br /><br />"IT WAS A spectacular bit of timing. On November 16th Baidu, a Chinese online-search giant, said it would buy YY Live, a China-focused video-streaming service with 40m monthly users, for $3.6bn. Two days later Muddy Waters, an American short-seller, published a report claiming YY Live was “an ecosystem of mirages” and “almost entirely fake”. The share price of JOYY, YY Live’s parent company, slid by 26%.<br /><br />Muddy Waters alleges that JOYY’s platforms, including YY Live, are infested with “bots”—computers that log on to “watch” streams, pretending to be human. Many, it says, appear to sit in JOYY’s internal networks. The upshot, it alleges, is that somewhere between 73% and 84% of JOYY’s revenue is suspect."<br /><br />This appears to be an innovative solution to platforms' loss of revenue to fraudsters, by bringing the fraud in-house!David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-20026195549137728582020-11-14T10:16:03.362-08:002020-11-14T10:16:03.362-08:00It isn't just Stacy Abrams. In How the Navajo ...It isn't just Stacy Abrams. In <a href="https://www.vox.com/21559183/navajo-nation-arizona-biden-indigenous-voters" rel="nofollow"><i>How the Navajo Nation helped Democrats win Arizona</i></a>, Rachel Ramrez reports on the organizing effort in Arizona, to which I contributed. Note in particular <a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/image-1024x683.jpg" rel="nofollow">these maps</a>.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.com