Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When you consider react-text: 249 the nagging privacy risks of online advertising, you may find comfort in the thought of a vast, abstract company like Pepsi or Nike viewing you as just one data point among millions. What, after all, do you have to hide from Pepsi? And why should that corporate megalith care about…
Some of the world’s biggest brands were ripped off by a digital fraud scheme that used a network of websites connected to US advertising industry insiders to steal what experts say could be millions of dollars, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. Approximately 40 websites used special code that triggered an avalanche of fraudulent views…
Credit: Illustration by Nicholas Little When BuzzFeed announced with fanfare last week that it is coming out with two bold new ad products that, in part, translate TV ads to GIFs for social and mobile, Jarrod Dicker, VP of commercial product and innovation at The Washington Post, couldn’t resist taking the bait. “The @washingtonpost RED…
If every generation gets the culture it deserves, then Creative Canada is the cultural policy we deserve. With its panegyrics to innovation, digital solutions, and “creative hubs,” Heritage Minister Melanie Joly’s new strategy, released on September 28, is an unmistakable product of our moment. But beneath the carapace of Silicon Valley jargon and political sloganeering hides…
react-text: 152 Three /react-text react-text: 154 years ago, shortly after I moved to the city, I was introduced to the whisper network—the unofficial information channel that women use to warn each other about men whose sexual behavior falls on the spectrum from creepy to criminal—for New York media. I had encountered these networks before, in…
One person’s page speed is another person’s monetization problem. Six publishing sources, requesting anonymity out of fear of angering Google, said their ads load slower than their content on AMP, and that is part of the reason why they make less money per pageview from AMP than they do from their own websites. In one…
Many publishers believe consumers would pay more attention to online ads if they were just better. Now Fusion Media Group is acting on that sentiment: It is trying out a new system that rewards advertisers that make the most engaging ads by giving them bonus impressions. The Univision-owned digital media company, whose 12 sites include…
In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that “there’s no room in American society” for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website. During the 2016 presidential…
The big five agency holding companies are so deeply mired in surcommissions and client distrust that media agencies as a whole face an existential crisis. Last week saw the great and the good of the advertising world trundle to New York City for Advertising Week – four days of talks, events, awards and general navel-gazing….
Six months in, Facebook’s test of mid-roll ad breaks within live and on-demand videos is driving scant revenue for publishers. Five publishers participating in Facebook’s mid-roll ads test, which began in March, said the product isn’t generating much money. One publisher said its Facebook-monetized videos had an average CPM of 15 cents. A second publisher,…