Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
/ .breakout.column-actions Ad blocking continues to freak out the entire media ecosystem. But god help me, it’s hard not to love the gnashing of teeth it’s causing throughout the publishing and advertising worlds right now. The level of bile flowing from furious media types continues to rise at the same rate as consumer ad-blocker use….
Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found…
.entry-header They’re almost a web fixture: Those spammy-looking links at the end of news articles, with photos of former TV stars and headlines like “What she looks like now will amaze you!” But despite the fact that many readers—and news companies, for that matter—hate them, they’re probably not going away anytime soon. The reason for…
Typical Outbrain ads. Readers are starting to express discontent about this sort of advertising. You see them everywhere, and maybe, sometimes, you click: those rows of links under web articles, often augmented with eye-catching photos and curiosity-stoking headlines about the latest health tips, celebrity news or ways to escape financial stress. Usually grouped together under…
Toy Unboxings and other kid videos like Nursery Rhymes like the Finger Family or live action skits with characters such as Elsa and Spiderman are a very weird class of videos on youtube. They can sometimes get hundreds of millions of views and it seems pretty baffling, but even this phenomena can be explained. Some…
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….
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…
Photo: AP Most publishers of news and information have policies governing their relationships to advertisers. Generally speaking, these policies are tailored to suit the goals of those publishers and the expectations of their audiences. Some publishers feel comfortable working closely with advertisers to generate stories and videos that appeal to those advertisers, others, such as…
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…