Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For months, YouTubers have complained that their view counts are down. New data from the third-party stat tracker SocialBlade confirms what YouTubers fear: viewership is lower across the board. SocialBlade crunched some numbers for Kotaku and determined that, since the first half of the year, YouTube views are now 5-7% lower. Between July and September,…
Ad tech had a mixed year. Venture capital for ad tech slowed down, while mergers and acquisitions rose. And as fake news became one of the hottest topics in the media industry, it became more apparent than ever that some ad tech companies profited from proliferating fake news while others banked on preventing ads from…
.entry-header December 20, 2016, 6:35 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Linkedin Share icons In what appears to be the largest digital advertising scam in history, a group of Russian hackers reportedly built a click-fraud machine that stole up to $5 million daily from top advertisers and publishers. But even that is just the tip of…
Despite beating Facebook in the early PR battle against fake news, Google is still indirectly helping fund publishers that intentionally spread misleading information. Google’s digital infrastructure touches nearly everything on the internet, including fake-news websites. So unlike tech companies with less reach, Google requires much more than mere blacklists to block fake news publishers from…
The prominence of fake and misleading news has shed light on how programmatic advertising and Facebook increasingly power the web, determining what readers see. Since then, Google and Facebook have vowed to stop serving ads to those shady corners of the internet. But that doesn’t stop bogus stories from making their way onto top-tier publishers, which…
When it comes to measurement errors, the third time is even less charming than the second and first. Last week, Marketing Land reported that Facebook had been miscalculating how often users react to live videos and how often users like and share links posted on Facebook. Because the error is the third of its kind…
Propaganda-lytics A journey into the behavioral tracking technologies of the right-wing “micro-propaganda” machine After running a second “fake news” data quest idea past Dave Carroll, I decided to use a simple script to sequentially visit each of the 117 websitesin the #Election2016 “micro-propaganda machine.” #Election2016 right-wing “micr0-propaganda network” With Mozilla’s “Lightbeam,” I was able to…
Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names. by Julia AngwinProPublica, Oct. 21, 2016, 7 a.m. Print Print Rt_Sdbr_Non-Mobile-Only300x250 Sidebar_Donate search Follow ProPublica Twitter Twitter Facebook Facebook volumelow Podcast RSS RSS Email Updates by…
Adrianne Jeffries Nov—26—2016 10:38PM EST In the movie Rushmore, the teacher Miss Cross asks, “nihilo sanctum estne?” The question is a mistranslation, but it’s supposed to mean is nothing sacred? That’s how I felt reading Jia Tolentino’s article about how a company called Emogi plans to invade our text messages with advertising. Travis Montaque, Emogi’s…
The fake news problem we’re facing isn’t just about articles gaining traffic from Facebook timelines or Google search results. It’s also an issue of news literacy — a reader’s ability to discern credible news. And it’s getting harder to tell on sight alone which sites are trustworthy. On a Facebook timeline or Google search feed,…