Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Google is stepping up its efforts to serve speedy content to mobile internet users with its Accelerated Mobile Pages, but the initiative is getting mixed reviews from publishers as some worry about its impact on their advertising revenue. Google unveiled AMP about a year ago and hundreds of companies are now publishing AMP versions of…
If shady political attack ads have a Mona Lisa, it’s probably the one that slammed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for issuing “weekend passes” to a convicted murderer named William Horton. Horton went on to commit assault, armed robbery, rape, and career assassination (on Mr. Dukakis). No attack ad this election season has come close to…
Publishers continue to gripe about ad tech’s complexity and transparency. And their frustrations were amplified earlier this month when the Guardian’s CRO, Hamish Nicklin, revealed that in some cases the publisher was only getting 30 percent of ad dollars spent programmatically. The Guardian case study raised a host of questions: Are these low yields common? Who…
We know that fraud is a major problem for online advertisers. But we don’t know how big a problem it is. Estimates range from 2% to 90% — which is another way of saying we have no fucking idea.The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) estimates that ad fraud will cost marketers $7.2 billion this year….
Evan Spiegel has a new deal for “Discover” publishers: We pay you up front, and we keep all the ad money. Snapchat says it’s done sharing with media companies. The red-hot messaging app wants to make a major change in the way it works with companies that supply it with content for its “Discover” section….
In February, I subscribed to all the presidential candidates’ email lists. Since then, I’ve gotten over 1,000 requests for money. Today is the 17th of October, and so far, this month, I’ve heard from Hillary Clinton’s campaign 32 times and Donald Trump’s 53 times. (Carly Fiorina chimed in once in support of Trump, too.) Sometimes…
How to Illegally Sway an Election Using “Sponsored Content” Bernie Sanders rallied tens of millions of voters by decrying the influence of corporate dollars in U.S. politics. But that’s not stopping big corporate donors from using his writing as part of illegal campaign advertisements. That’s thanks, in no small part, to the failure of the…
We have all heard of ad fraud. And we all probably also know that showing ads to bots — non-human visitors — is a waste of money. But what is less well is how ad fraud can wreak havoc on analytics and measurement — to the point that what you see in analytics is not…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Two of Google’s ad measurement metrics have been suspended from accreditation from the Media Rating Council (MRC) — a key accreditation service advertisers and publishers use to verify that their ads are being properly measured — over “non-compliance” issues related to the way in which it counts its ad impressions. MRC announced…
Hamish Nicklin In worst case scenarios, for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher. The revelation, announced by the Guardian’s new chief revenue officer, Hamish Nicklin, at the Automated Trading Debate on Tuesday (4 Oct), means a host of adtech businesses operating within the supply…