Given that Alphabet has 686.56M outstanding shares at the moment, this research firm believes that Google's market cap will go from it's current $495B to $137B.
This "research firm" has been super bearish with regards to Google/Alphabet and is obviously short. All of this "adocalypse" talk seems somewhat overblown. Besides, even if Google's display ad business went to zero, it would certainly not exactly kill 3/4 of their revenue and/or profits (because there's still all the search ad business).
I'm not connecting the dots because everything they wrote in that article is good for Google if it ends. Ad dollars that would be spent at Google are being burned on ad exchanges and content recommendation ad networks.
Google's introduction of AMP looks to me like a direct attack on Taboola and the ad exchanges. You can read a lot of major news outlets now without your mobile phone choking.
Google's fraud department is very aggressive. Publishers maybe get away with sending low quality traffic through to Adsense/Doubleclick for a while, but traffic brokers will mix fraudulent traffic in, only Google will catch it, and then the publisher ends up with a very large negative account balance.
There are some separate issues with very bad quality sites and mobile apps ending up in Google's platform. This wasn't the case years ago. Much of it is from sites with buzz and viral in the domains and is coming from Facebook. It is real, but the clicks are maybe 100% accidental and the smart pricing algorithms are not punishing it like they should.
The correct conclusion of this article is that media publishers who have relied on huge volumes of un-targeted, non-retaining, mediocre traffic with shitloads of display ads/auto play video ads/etc are running out of time. The platforms which serve them may be over valued by a lot.
Google+Youtube and Facebook are the big winners. The ad dollar share will shift back to them. They can deliver ads through their mobile apps in a way that is not easily blockable even at the network level. Future ads delivered through voice interfaces (Siri, Alexa) and messaging platforms (Snapchat, FB Messenger) are going to make ad blocking more of a non-issue as content & ad blend together. Maybe at some point you stick a Magic Leap in your eyeball and an AI auto-blocks anything suspected to be paid for to your retina while noise cancelling headphones kill the audio stream, but that isn't a near-future issue for now.
There is a whole separate issue regarding Google's increasing replacement of organic results with basically just ads. Google may be in a very, very tight position to meet their quarterly numbers and could start missing.
One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well.
Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd that anyone would be interested in following these ads and click-bait articles, but the truth is people enjoy that sort of content. This is why gossip magazines sell like hot cakes.
I am not sure what the solution is. People like all sorts of things that are bad for them.
One of the differences is that the same types of garbage ads that fill gossip magazines (and the back pages of good magazines like the New Yorker) is that these ads are being pushed to us front and center of nearly any site you visit.
I avoid these ads in print. It is easy to not read magazine or skip the back ads. I don't even feel that I give the front ads of the New Yorker or the Economist much of my attention. I can easily passively avoid ads in print.
Online, ads have become highly annoying and detract from the experience of website in a way that does not happen in print.
I am not saying that I entirely avoid print ads. Back in the day of Creative Computing and Byte Magazine, I would pour over the ads as much as the editorial content. The ads were interesting to me.
Right, but the web is the great democracy. And in the great democracy, the will of the majority wins outright. I believe, that a majority of the folks on the web today are alright with these ads. Much like the ads in Creative Computing spoke to you, todays ads speak to exactly the people they are targeting
The difference is, we all use the web, where as we don't all read People Magazine. Such is the nature of the great democracy.
and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it. Everybody likes to complain about advertising but no one has come up with a way to eliminate it without a large portion of the sites we use everyday shutting down.
That is the core of the issue that people keep missing in these discussions. Web advertising in its current state didn't form in a vacuum, it's a byproduct of our expectation that content on the Internet is mostly free.
We aren't missing the point of web advertising. The problems being described, especially with traffic laundering - illegitimate sites are making money from ads, but aren't giving a return to the company buying the ad. When you have a low ROI on making an ad, you stop buying them. At that point, we don't have enough legitimate ads to support the web content we actually want to see survive.
The solution isn't to get rid of the Ads, it is to get rid of the perversion of the system (easier said than done). An efficient ad system is better for everybody.
This is true. The problem is stupid buyers. Many people here would be shocked at the lack of sophistication (or 'sophisticated buying theater') some marketers use to deploy 8 figure annual marketing budgets. It's getting better slowly and as it does we'll see less of this kind of crap.
To their credit, many of the DSPs (at least AppNexus) are trying to clean up their own systems as well and automatically block this type of traffic from being purchased. The trend in ad-tech right now around viewability and viewable eCPM metrics is also a step in the right direction.
So let's change the expectation. There is a real cost to these "free" services (as has been discussed at length on hn and elsewhere) and this cost is only rising as more and more people block ads. I am looking forward to businesses failing on the ad supported model so that jew approaches are tried instead.
For example, I would pay 99 cents for a full story after reading a teaser if this was easy to do. I'd even buy a membership if I could trust that a news org isn't pushing an agenda (looking at you, NYT, WaPo and many others). Heck, maybe crowdfunding select journalists is the key. I know organizations are trying to think out of the box, but because ads are still giving them a cushion I charge that they are not trying hard enough.
You'd think so, but BuzzFeed publishes some really good original content, including investigative reporting, which is bankrolled by the truckloads of clickbait they shovel out.
>>One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them. They work, and they work very well.
They do work, but not very well. Think about the false positives. How many people accidentally click an ad? Even on HN, where the crowd is very tech-savvy, people always complain about it. Now imagine average users.
The fact that there are people who click on ads on purpose is a given. Otherwise ads wouldn't exist. That's why no one talks about it: it's like saying the sky is blue. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.
Right I agree. But admitting that may change how we view the issue. If we accept it isn't these faceless near-criminals throwing garbage at us, but rather advertising companies producing ads that work.
Still, I do not know what to do about it. It is the bane of minority to be at the will of the majority.
I boycott them. Google News will present three articles about the same thing, and I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should be: an actual summary of the story. Sometimes all of them are clickbait, so I just click the one for the site that I like most. It was surprising when I first saw that even respectable companies like Time and USA Today had adopted the clickbait style with gusto.
I'm not saying that this boycott will catch on and change the world. It's just my own little war.
> Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd
It's not because I'm in tech that I am wise to their tricks. It's because of my writing background. I have only bits and pieces of evidence from my own non-tech friends, but I'm pretty sure most people are aware that ads and clickbait are manipulative and that gossip magazines are the linguistic equivalent of junk food and bad for the heart.
And while I said I was dismayed to see the old guard like Time and USA Today adopt the tactic of clickbait, most disconcerting of all is to see everyday people start to adopt it. I've seen quite a few blog posts and Medium articles posted on HN with clickbait titles. And on a certain video production forum, I see members starting threads with clickbait subjects (something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!"). Forum members get no money for clicks. So why do they do it? Maybe they just want some attention. But I'm a little worried that it's just unconscious imitation, that clickbaiting is catching on like a bad habit.
Another problem is how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it? Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits, but there could be always some that are genuine.
Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again. Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!".
However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their products are sometimes actually useful to you!
> Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits, but there could be always some that are genuine.
Can you think of an example? Make one up, I don't mean scour the internet for one. I thought about what you said and I can't think of an instance where the crappy clickbait headlines we're used to seeing would actually be a well-descriptive headline for its content.
Like, I can't think of an instance where something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!" [or other clickbait formats] is a reasonable descriptor for its content, where you just can't write title without titling it like that.
> otherwise honest people have to resort to clickbait tactics to compete with the worsening signal-to-noise ratio
Exactly. Imagine that you are a pristine expert in your subject and want to share your knowledge. Now, you want to write a well-researched article and post it on your blog, think what title will you give it?
If its a plain old title like "Acme stock is down by 5%", that won't be doing justice to your well-researched article. Maybe, you have got insights about technical/fundamental analyses about Acme stock that the rest of the professionals don't? Unless you give it a catchy title like "10 reasons to avoid Acme stock" or "Unpredictable mess lie ahead of Acme", no one is going to read your article (although it deserves to be read by millions).
tldr; Even a good product needs marketing sometimes.
> how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it?
It's easy. The headline should tell the whole story:
"Acme Widget stock down 2.5%"
"CERN sientists discover Higgs Boson"
"Smith and Jones tied in polls"
There is no mystery ("Acme Widget stock makes startling change"). While there's not much room for detail, still: 1) I know what the article is about, 2) I know whether I would be interested in the rest, and 3) I can get a summary of the day's happenings just by skimming the headlines. This was the original purpose of headlines and one of the main reasons for the article itself following a structure called the Inverted Pyramid. The headline told the whole story, just in outline. The first sentence of the article told the whole story again, just with a little more detail. The first paragraph covered the whole story again, in yet more detail. Want more details? Keep reading paragraphs. You can stop at any time. Your only loss is some detail. Compare that to the circuitous, long-winded introductions of many blogs, where the writer finally gets to the point about two thirds through.
Clickbait deliberately withholds information, instead of giving all it can in the room that it has. Clickbait churns up questions, headlines give answers. Clickbait lures you into a story that, in the end, was not interesting to you. Headlines help you know whether the story will be interesting to you or not.
News stories are different from editorial, opinion, informational, entertainment, etc. articles. For example, the top article on Google News for me right now is a NYT editorial: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as It Looks." If I saw that on old-fashioned newsprint while skimming down the page, I would definitely stop and read it. I also clicked the article to read the story on GN.
I don't think the headline is clickbait: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as It Looks." It's vague, yes, but it would be hard to cram much more into the headline.
If you read the article, the reasons he gives for "why the jobs report is not quite as terrible as it looks" is a hodgepodge of unrelated things: (a) the report's margin of error is 100,000; (b) a three-month average is better; (c) a wave of people are retiring; and (d) "as the economy approaches full employment, jobs growth must slow."
It's hard to summarize it better than: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as It Looks Because . . . It's Complicated" (haha) or maybe "The Jobs Report Is Down From Last Time But As Expected for a Mature Economy." More descriptive, but kind of a clunker. I didn't say writing tight headlines was easy.
Either way, I am not irritated at all by the original headline, because it gives me an accurate indication of whether I would read the rest of the article. In my case, I wouldn't. I look at the economy like the weather: complex, hard to predict, and of little effect on me unless it's really bad.
> News stories are different from editorial, opinion,
> informational, entertainment, etc. articles.
I agree. Sometimes you're in the mood for a rambling essay. Some things are complicated or indeterminate and cannot be easily summed up.
> I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should be: an actual summary of the story.
I think you might be stating your opinion as fact. Clearly there are a lot of people in web publishing who disagree. Also, we're talking about link titles not headlines.
I'm not in web publishing but still I'd argue that the whole point of a link title is to get you to click on it. Just like the whole point of the design on your cereal box is to get you to buy that one instead of some other box. One link title can be measurably better than another by counting how many clicks each one gets.
How about if the title is trying to deceive me about the contents? Is lying a moral issue?
How about if the title is manipulating me to try to get me to click on it in order to make money from me doing so, even though it's going to waste my time? Is that a moral issue?
One example - while browsing, people read many more headlines than actual articles. If you follow a popular strategy of overemphasized or misleading headlines, you're essentially lying to people on mass scale.
This is a real problem, because people end up remembering (and believing) the bullshit they read in a headline, without ever realizing that the actual article debunked that statement.
A couple of opinions (while we're tossing opinions around):
I think we're still conflating link titles and headlines--they serve different functions. Link titles exist to get you to click through to the article. I'd argue that they should not have misleading information in it, but they should be enticing, and specifically, they should NOT summarize the contents of the article (otherwise why would anyone even click through?) Headlines are the first thing you see when you do click through to an article, and should nicely summarize the article so you don't have to stay long on the page to get the gist of what it's about.
Totally agree with you on not putting bullshit in a headline! As a reader I want a summary of the article so I don't need to stay long.
> we're still conflating link titles and headlines
They're the same thing everywhere I go: Google News, Hacker News, newspaper websites, articles reposted on Facebook . . . Where are you going that they're different?
> they should NOT summarize the contents of the article (otherwise why would anyone even click through?)
For the details. If an article is interesting to me, I will click it. Won't you?
- Arch Linux adopts systemd
- More and more developers trying out Rust
- Useful shell one-liners
I would click each of these. They're a little vague, but I made them up in a hurry. Still, I my clickbait radar would not have gone off on any of them.
There are three kinds of stories: 1) the kind I want to read in depth (like on programming or photography), 2) the kind I want to know usually just the gist (like the economy, politics, world news), and 3) the kind I don't even care to know the gist about (like some celebrity gossip, a diet fad that the writer already knows is ineffectual, etc.)
I just want the headline to convey whether, after I read the whole article, I will think it was worth it. The problem with clickbait is that it arouses your curiosity for everything, but at the end you feel the same way you feel after eating candy.
> most disconcerting of all is to see everyday people start to adopt it.
"User posts interesting observation on website. The last paragraph implies a terrifying view into the future."
I think (hope? fear?) that it is mostly imitation. We start learning language by imitation and we never really stop. Will the clickbait we learn today go away again our stay with us?
Pre-radio newspaper headlines are notorious for their crazy front page headlines. It would be interesting to analyze everyday writing from that time for traces of the front page style. If present, did those patterns go away again or did they shape language as we use it today?
What is "click-bait" in this context? Is it in the Google search results? Or is it an ad displayed in a page? If it's an ad, why call it click-bait - it's just an ad.
Because largely they masquerade as content, and some users are not savvy enough to spot that. An "article" like "You won't believe what these 80s stars look like now" is not obviously an ad.
Work for what? Do you actually purchase items you see in these ads because of the ads? Especially on mobile, every ad click I've ever made was accidental.
Small businesses are foolish for advertising like this, especially ppc. Large business may be able to get some sort of successful branding out of it I suppose.
One aspect of web ads that nobody seems to mention, especially with click-bait articles, is that people click them.
No one seems to mention the exceedingly obvious, without which the whole discussion is rendered moot. The fact that someone, somewhere is clicking an ad is not lost us, but we've moved on to a higher level discussion.
In theory the solution is simple: show click-bait ads to people who enjoy them only. Publishers still get make money and the ads don't get in the way for people who don't care.
This is why Google and Facebook are kings in the online advertising world, because the have mastered the art of showing ads to people that are most likely to care. Heck, Google Search doesn't even show ads at all in their search pages if they figured you never click on them.
In practice this is hard to do without troves of user behaviour data, but the approach that companies like Taboola and Outbrain take of showing irrelevant ads to everyone visiting is definitively not the solution, and if anything it's only going to diminish the efficacy of online ads further in the long run.
I suspect it would be more realistic to say "they work at least very slightly better than the less attention-grabby-information-zero headlines".
If they worked very well there wouldn't need to be so many of them per page and for articles carrying them to be split into so many single paragraph pages (because enough money would be made that the site owner would start considering design and UX factors as much as getting that extra 0.0000000001$ per page impression).
Just because people use it so much it kills them doesn't mean it provides value to them.
Just because clickbait preys on our nature doesn't make it valuable.
Easy to argue that by choosing manipulation over substance for the sole reason of generating revenue that you are not providing value, you are more of a rent seeker, not providing anything new of value but rather seeking rents on existing content. Seeing as most clickbait is "Top 10 Things Our Underpaid Interns Stole From Other Sites: You won't believe #7!", the rent seeking analogy is kinda decent.
Maybe "value" wasn't the right word. I would hope that these types of things would fail because the users would give up clicking through 20 pages of ads but the fact that "respected" outlets like Forbes still do it suggests otherwise.
That's a very good point. Based on my personal experience ,I noticed especially in the last year or 2. When I tried to block the new Facebook ads that they were putting in different parts of the page and they were becoming more cluttertish to the main news feed. Also.Forbes (who caught this early on) doesnt let you proceed to go on their site unless you turn off ad blocking
The presence of honey attracts bees, the presence of horse shit attracts flies, the presence of sheep attracts wolves, and the presence of manipulable people attracts manipulators.
If these people started visiting another part of the web, "Ad Tech" would immediately re-emerge there too. The tigers just follow the herds of wild buffalos.
So, yes, watch out, if you can see wild buffalos, that means indeed that the tigers cannot be far away.
The article wants to jeopardize the god-given right of some of the manipulators to manipulate the manipulable crowds.
"Ad dollars are being stolen from publishers who actually put in an effort to create original, useful content. This is very wrong."
Ha ha ha hah ha!
Apparently, there are legitimate and illegitimate manipulators. The good and the bad thieves! The good and the bad burglars!
They are in a daggers-drawn contest on who exactly has the right to rip off the idiots!
Yes, good question, who is the one who legitimately "owns" these idiots?
Actually it shouldn't be because this has nothing to do with affiliate marketing.
Most affiliates get paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, so they're actually extremely disincentivized from buying against laundered traffic because it doesn't perform well.
EDIT: Immaturely commented without reading article in full. Now get the "laundered traffic" issue. Thanks for correcting me. Either way, kept my initial response.
Jamie, I don't understand what you mean by laundered traffic.
The clicks generated by click-baits, advertorials, etc you see on the sites the study mentioned are real, non-bot traffic.
The ads you see there do in fact direct to shell sites, more commonly referred to as "bridge" pages. All these sites do is create a conversion funnel that starts with (for example) priming the reader about "fit girls" and end up in an advertorial for a diet pill.
It's not affiliate marketing per se, as nowadays companies have their own media buyers, but the fact is that businesses that are profitable enough to profit from high volume, high chargeback rates are shady business that are usually very active in affiliate marketing and CPA-networks. AKA, loans, insurance, diet pills, etc.
So yes, it's not affiliate marketing, it's actually shady businesses. But it's easy to make a single business compliant and run "good ads", whereas it's not that easy to make thousands of affiliate compliant. And that's where you see the problem.
These affiliates are the ones that turn to shady tactics and click-baits, etc (which is simple a strategy to increase click-through-rates) to maximize their profit.
This is the traffic laundering part. From the article:
"visitors are sent to low-end websites. But if you happen to be of high value to the ad tech industry (based on your IP), you’ll be redirected through a loop of various shell websites, spending a fraction of a second on each, in order to increase the apparent quality of these websites’ audience."
The "seedier" actors in the ad space have always been about arbitrage. You can argue all you want how they're destroying the web, but the fact is they can purchase cheap traffic and remonetize it for gain. That's the definition of arbitrage and it exists in all types of industries, and is usually not viewed negatively.
Advertisers are in full control of assigning value to a traffic source by way of demographic targeting and bidding... Either the Advertisers are still profiting over the whole interaction or they're bidding too much for their traffic. It's not the middle men who are to blame.
You can argue all you want "how they're destroying the web, but the fact is they can purchase cheap traffic and remonetize it for gain. That's the definition of arbitrage"
People don't have a problem with arbitrage. It's just the annoying ads when you're surfing the net.
Not saying this destruction is happening or not, but their data to support their claims is dreadful. All circumstantial viewing of links and pages, google news trends, and Alexa profiles. Sadly, these days claims that may be correct can be ignored when the supporting data supplied is weak (and vice versa).
I have, very occasionally, been extremely grateful to have seen ads. I don't want ads to go away, I want irrelevant ads to go away. I really wish that:
1) When I bought something on Amazon, they would advertise products other than the exact one I just purchased.
2) There was a chrome app which would, every week, ask me what personal projects I was working on and then replace the existing ads I saw with ads that would be relevant to the problems I'm willing to spend money on.
For 2), if you're an Android user, you might want to install the Google Opinion Rewards app. It's an application that shows (sponsored) user research surveys, many times well targeted ones. The app is very clear about how your answers to some questions are added to your Google Ad profile, to show you "more relevant advertising".
On top of that you get paid a few cents for answering the questions, which can accumulate pretty fast. I hate to sound like a shill, but I've been using the app and I never pay for Android Play apps anymore just because of credits accumulated through surveys I have answered. And I don't even take any of the questions that will add to my Ad profile, so I've actually been skipping about 80% of them.
So many are "Which of the following places have you visited recently?" followed by a list of stores I've either been looking up or was navigating near.
Probably 98% of the time the correct answer is "none of the above" so that's what I pick and I get my 5-10cents. Occasionally I can tell that it's a survey that someone commissioned (asking about how likely you are to vote in some primary, etc) and I do tend to answer those as well.
Overall in the time I've had the app I've collected $60.19 (just checked history). Granted, this is from two years of use but it's good pocket change for Play Store purchases (hey, that $1.49 icon pack or watch face I wouldn't normally bother with? Purchase.)
I guess on some level I understand that like radio or free alt-weeklies, they sell access to eyeballs and earholes in order to fund the services I actually make use of. If they're gonna analyze my usage to try to determine which things are relevant and cut down on spam and wasted ad expenditures, I might as well make a few bucks from it in the process.
And as you say, sometimes I get one that I don't want to answer and it's pretty clearly laid out so I can decline.
> Occasionally I can tell that it's a survey that someone commissioned
Yes, I think that's the point of the app. It's basically selling to customers (businesses) more direct access to information that it'd normally gather through tracking or not at all. It's an interesting model in that it's a bit more transparent, and it does pay the customer directly. I wonder if we'll start seeing more of that in the future, where users actually "sell" their eyeballs directly.
Or you could install our Ad Limiter[1], and block most Google ads in Google search results. Google is getting in your face with their entire screens of Google ads for some searches.
This seems unrelated to the original post's request. He does not say he wants to see fewer ads, nor ads for specific brands, but rather more customized ads.
I agree with this. Working for an ad tech company this is something that somewhat goes beyond our ability, as the site itself would have to add this feature or open this data to the company doing the ads. It's very annoying when you go to one of those other places and know they don't do this.
I've seen 1) mentioned so many times here on HN that I think I should apply to the next batch with the idea for a retargeting network that only shows complementary and add-ons for products you've already bought.
Re 1: The trouble is that (by far) the most common thing that consumers do after buying X is to buy another X. The second most common is to buy another thing in the same taxonomy as X (something very much like X, but slightly different). This is the case over a very broad range of taxonomies. So when you build a purchase propensity model, you often have to explicitly tell it not to recommend X.
Advertising is not about showing you the most relevant advertisement, it's about showing you the most profitable one. Unfortunately, the most profitable one is usually a fake download button to malware, or a site selling an e-book to lose 10 lbs in 10 days. Yes, you would be much happier seeing an ad for a cool new pub down the street that just opened, and you're more likely to click the ad as well, but they don't have the budget to compete for your clicks or impressions.
I think a major change needs to happen. Advertising is falling to rock bottom, ad blockers are on the rise, and I think we're going to see more and more online apps and content sites going out of business.
Users need to start paying for the sites they visit. Why do people pay $2 for a simple mobile app they only use 2 or 3 times, but they refuse to pay a news site they read daily, that has a staff of writers and high quality content? I wonder if we'll see the majority of the internet behind a pay wall one day, where every site gives you a small preview of content or limited features, and you pay for full access.
> Unfortunately, the most profitable one is usually a fake download button to malware, or a site selling an e-book to lose 10 lbs in 10 days.
This is completely false. The most relevant ad (statistically, based on real data) is going to be around something you actually want to buy, likely from a brand or product you saw recently, or are already a customer of. An e-book to lose 10 lbs in 10 days might be the best ad for someone who is in-market for short-term weight loss solutions, but is going to be a terrible ad for most people.
At some point it isn't really an advert but actual content. A lot of people enjoy shopping online and use instagram etc. to find products. There are lots of sites that push a particular view of amazon products to make finding things easier. In comparison it seems impractical to use an algorithm to guess at what someonce may want to buy.
Can someone explain how the toasted balls play works? Are they arbitraging by buying cheap porn ads then selling higher priced ads to the same traffic?
I don't see how this would work, except for the paragraph that follows in the article talking about "laundering" traffic to make it appear higher quality, so maybe they get good money for their ads? But still, CPC is generally not cheap compared to CPM.
I can't speak to this site, but I used to work in adtech fraud detection and often sites would be served inside a hidden iframe on a less legit site. They would sell CPM impressions.
>Are they arbitraging by buying cheap porn ads then selling higher priced ads to the same traffic?
Exactly. An advertiser like Walmart won't buy ads on a porn site so toastedballs is buying ads on porn sites then showing the high quality users from those sites ads from legitimate companies.
Buy traffic from porn ads at say $0.05 (I am making these figures up) per 1000 impressions with the hope that perhaps 5% click through to your site (again, making up click-through rates).
On your page (i.e. the page where people go if they click your ads), you host advertising from others - that advertising might be pay-per-click or pay per 1000 (CPM).
The numbers:
So lets say you pay 5c for 1000 ads and you get 50 visits to your site, or to think of it another way $1 gets you 1000 visitors to your site.
That means that you either need to find a cost-per-1000 advertiser that is over $1 per 1000, or you need to find an advertiser that pays enough per-click on their ads to cover that $1 cost, e.g. if you get a 1% click-through rate on the ads on your site, that $1 to get 1000 visitors will also get you 10 ad clicks, so if you can find a pay-per-click advertiser that offers more than 10c per click, you're making money.
They are buying pop ups so the user doesn't need to click anything. The ads on the publisher's side are sold on a CPM basis so they don't need to click there either. The math just isn't going to work if you need to buy clicks on one side and sell them on the other.
The big magic was basically video ads on the ad exchange. The advertisers paid more and had no actionable metrics to track, much less tracking clicks. There is some smart pricing, so the CPMs do get driven down, but not to 0.
The hard part to this is what happens when you don't get paid or worse you get a bill going back months for money already paid out.
I think "Ad tech" is a bit too generic as there are many players, and pieces in this game and some are very legit, while the others they talk about are not. Unfortunately the bad guys, give them all the bad image.
Yeah in my opinion traffic laundering - well, fake traffic as a general thing - is a real issue with the arts and entertainment sector - the desire to have something go viral is intense. It may not be jacking ads to show other information, but as far as using web resources in a fraudulent manner, it's a relative. Clicks beget clicks. It's actually baked into the design of websites: Reddit, HN, Facebook...all these sites cater to the idea that a swarm will raise something above the fray and get attention.
There are numerous services that offer indie musicians batches of clicks or followers or what have you. I stay far away from all that because, in hard terms, I want to track organic metrics. Well that and the general principle of thinking pay-for-fake-listens is essentially gutter-trash dishonest behavior. Others...obviously don't feel the same, so the industry exists.
Sorry, this is faux outrage. Some real world perspective:
- Content promotion is different than display ads, at least in terms of how receptive the audience is to buying. There's lots of research around this (nobody trusts display ads).
- Most content promo widgets run way below the fold and are a last squeeze on the traffic before it leaves your site. The alternative to not running it is earning nothing, not swapping it out. Generally you've already flashed your own related content widget at the visitor.
- You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...
- Old School Traffic Washing... so what? You take a bunch of junk traffic and filter it into real humans who are in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind. Often with some level of intelligence about what they are interested in, via the stuff they click on. That's actually a good ad audience.
Seriously, do Google display advertisers reduce their rates because the last search on Google was for "my filthy secret"? No, that space runs at the same rate.
What's next, you gonna ban advertising from stupid TV shows too? There's stuff on cable that's easily as bad as many click-bait sites, in terms of intellectual content.
As long as it's not a bot and the brand ad is running next to content appropriate for a brand ad, not seeing what the problem is here. If you don't like it, don't place it on your site or click on it.
[I'd be more outraged about pop-ups and toolbar widgets; that IS a UX interruption and often non-consensual...]
> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want.
You tell me once, I need X, I won't care. You tell me ten times a day I need X, I might get tired. Color me pessimistic, but people in general just need to be told with clear words over and over what to do and without a strong independent or stubborn mind they will follow.
> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures.
Yes, my brain has a weak spot for cat pictures, but I don't want to have it challenged all the time.
> You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...
That's true to an extent, but go to your Facebook feed (if you have one), find a clickbait article and (without clicking on it) read the comments below.
Almost invariably, there will be someone complaining that they clicked the link out of curiosity then quickly left after discovering how abysmally horrible the user experience is.
Some of the sites literally (as in literally) make you go to a new page of ads for each sentence you read. Their whole business model is to trick you into loading the ads in your browser and showing you as many as possible before you give up.
So it's a bit of an oversimplification to say people are clicking on these links because they want to. People buy snake oil because they want to.
> - You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...
Clickbait articles have low quality content. It's usually hard to judge article quality by the link's title. Most people are tired of being misled into trashy websites.
A good reminder that the business model of the free-content internet is a pathetically weak house of cards. Between the trivial availability of ad-blockers and the laughable vapidity of the form taken by most ads, I think we are due for a correction in the sector of ad-supported content.
As others have pointed out before, I don't think we'll be losing much of great value and there are a huge variety of alternative revenue models available for user-supported content.
And good riddance. If I go the rest of my like and never see another ad, that will be fine with me. Same goes for just about all the free content I currently consume. Won't miss it.
I think you might be projecting bias. People like free stuff - do you honestly believe that the market will go to a paid version of Facebook or Snapchat?
>free-content internet is a pathetically weak house of cards.
>we are due for a correction in the sector of ad-supported content.
In my opinion, the problem is with the ad tech companies themselves more than the free-content internet.
I don't think the free-content is the problem as much as the incentive of ad tech companies and ad agencies to ignore or perpetuate fraud, arbitrage and gaming the system, and the branding advertisers who are too dumb to demand real accountability.
Essentially, all these VC backed ad-tech companies need to show growth, so they want the fraud, bots and low quality ad impressions.
Big brand advertisers fool themselves into thinking the quality of the placement is less important than reaching the right people, so they keep on paying for garbage impressions, feeding these unsustainable ad tech companies, without demanding bottom line accountability for measurable results.
and... Ad agencies are compensated with an archaic model from back in the day when they earned commission from the publishers, so they want as much ad spend as possible. Plus, they like be treating like kings by the VC-backed ad tech companies.
It's all one big party, where the consumers suffer and the legit, performance advertisers suffer.
There is still, despite over 3000 marketing tech startups, no one really serving the ad buyers needs in a significant way.
we don't need another bid algorithm or vanity metric system... we need ad tech that systematically roots out bots, fraud, and is accountable to bottom line results for advertisers instead of acting as a broker that makes money regardless.
Build that tech and you will have a billion dollar company.
I wrote quite a bit here in other comments, then I read some more and looked closer at the Kalkis-Research site. Please if you are a journalist and are going to link to this article, take a closer look at the writers.
Is this even a real site?
a) Only the 3 posts about Google are free. The other articles have very short descriptions and say you can buy them for €10,000. The thumbnail image accompanying the buy link is the same in all. They may not even exist.
b) For all the details and charts in the Google pieces, they say "BEARISH -70%" but have absolutely no math or estimation about how they came to that conclusion.
c) The authors are pointing out fraud largely outside of Google's traffic ecosystem -- ad exchanges, content recommendation ad networks -- but some how Google is the company that will lose half of its value. They couldn't be bothered to look at other public adtech companies?
e) What they outline definitely with regards to worthless ads being sold is definitely real, occurring, and I'm not contesting that.
Whats truly ironic about this, is that this is the exact type of site that the site is railing against. They probably buy native ads on sites like Forbes, just trying to sell you an expensive infoproduct. (No wonder the author knows so much about this rampant problem :)
I did notice that the writing came off as rather amateurish. It was a little too aggressive and salesy to feel legit.
You can check our stats on Alexa for incoming traffic, we don't buy anything. HackerNews is actually our main source, given the nature of articles that are free. I actually wanted to buy some traffic from OutBrain to see how it works, but then changed my mind precisely for this reason: not to pollute our footprint.
We don't rally against websites that buy traffic to sell a product, especially something of higher quality. That's how advertising works, and it finances the whole Web. We're rallying against websites that bring nothing to the table, who spend longer on the title of the article than on the content, who circumvent the spirit of the rules to take the fast buck.
As or the writing, we're all beginners at some point, give us time!
I still agree with the top thread that this isn't a "real" site, and speculate that it's just trying to drive PageRank to the long list of "spammy" sites linked multiple times in the article (via Hacker News).
advertising finances the whole Web? the WHOLE Web? didn't you get the new style guide? it's web now. i've been developing for it since 1995. advertising was NEVER part of the equation. i've made millions. you're an idiot. go spam your bullshit to some other sucker, lady.
We're detailing the -70% in our first piece, it's based on the assumption of a 30% reduction in profits (so a 10%-15% fall in revenue, especially now that Alphabet's moonshots are eating up more & more of ad revenue from Google), which would lead to a repricing of the stock from "growth" to "value", and thus a P/E of 15 instead of 30.
Fraud is part of Google. Spider.io discovered bot clicks on Youtube ads, which we mention. Not long ago, news came out that a botnet had infected AdSense for Search (http://marketingland.com/botnet-hijacks-search-results-sipho...), so the actual google.com ad real estate that's considered the best in the world. No one is safe.
We are new and we do exist. You can check our profiles on LinkedIn, the names are real & all. If you drop us a line by email, we'll gladly answer. You must also aknowledge that every piece needs substantial amounts of work, so someone real has to actually put in all the manhours. Notwithstanding the technology that's behind the charts.
The posts on ad tech are free because we need to make a name for ourselves.
The thumbnails suck because we overlooked it, focusing on everything else, thanks for pointing that out :) Cheers
Of the -70%, the biggest drop comes from the assumption that PE is going down to 15 from 30. That in itself is such a big assumption. Other arguments you spell out are valid, but does not justify the PE adjustment.
AdSense wasn't infected... Users of AdSense were... SOME users... a small number. probably less than the number of people whose machines were locked down with ransomware instead of set to click ads. would you rather have ransomware, or someone else in charge of the ads you ignore?
so... you get accused of singling out google, so then you point out you "mentioned" youtube? you do know who owns youtube, right? give me $10,000 and i'll send you my report on who owns youtube.
Thank you for bringing some sanity to this discussion. The article should probably be flagged and pulled. Just read their About page--no details whatsoever and their methodology appears to be looking at Google Trends and the news.
As a senior buy-side ad guy who has been in the space for a long time, here's my $.02 for what it is worth:
- Click/impression/view fraud are big problems. Viewability solutions are still nascent, but improving. Google and Facebook are both fairly uniquely positioned (due to their data advantages) to continue getting better at cleaning things up.
- People who think Google in particular is interested in perpetuating ad fraud aren't thinking things through to conclusion. The reason advertisers like myself spend as much as we do is because from what we can see in the data, it is profitable. Display is arguably less measurable (yada yada attribution yada), but Google is fiercely protective of their ad quality. Being recognized as a source of quality traffic that drives profit is Google's moat. If they could instantly kill all fraudulent traffic they would do it in a heartbeat because they know it would mean even more spend from advertisers who find them to be even more profitable. This is of greater importance now moreso than ever before with the rise of FB and FB's gains on the mobile advertising front.
- There is a lot of thrashing and consolidation occurring in the display ecosystem. There is a major shift that has been in the making for years where advertisers are focusing more and more on "audiences" vs. "placements." Thus, whomever has the better audience data will be better positioned. Google has significantly better audience data than most ad networks and exchanges out there. A lot of the highest quality data is 1st party data living in someone's DMP or CRM, and Google has opened up tools for onboarding those audiences much like FB has (yay lookalike targeting!). Not that they didn't know who people were already.
- The sell-side has significant pressure from the buy-side to clean up their act. Unless they are doing some sketchy arbitrage, 99% of ad buyers want to stamp out fraudulent traffic. Publishers who can't survive without it are not long for this world. Ultimately there are significant interests and dollars behind killing fraud.
- Ad fraud will always exist in some form. That's why it is a number's game as well as a game of whack-a-mole.
But yes, back to the original point--let's please not read too much into this...ahem..."well-sourced research."
Coowner of one the larger premium ad exchanges here. I see a lot of folks concerned about clickbait. I genuinely think this concern is overblown.
Clickbait articles service people who want them: people who are looking for quick payoff content.
And that's most people. US Weekly, People Magazine –– this is all clickbait. Even programs like NBC's Today Show and Tonight Show: dashed-off, quick-hit, prefab bits––each of which is probably actually an ad, for something. And in between those ads, there are––wait for it––more ads. Most of media is clickbait and has been for a very long time. Even for Hacker News readers, reading solely The Economist can get boring after a while. (A real short while, if you ask me.) There's nothing wrong with fun.[1]
I see some people here concerned that clickbait sites are wasting advertisers' dollars, but that isn't true, either. Advertisers do not purchase ads on websites. They purchase audiences. BMW wants BMW intenders, and doesn't (within a reasonable bound) care in which app or on which site it can locate them. BMW buyers don't watch exploding watermelons? Nonsense! That's why adtech exists––because finding the right people is vastly more important than the distinct complexion of the publication itself. [2]
What about the rampant fraud, bots and arbitrage between exchanges that do nothing to provide real value and that exchanges have no incentive to correct and according to some prominent advertisers are actually happy about all the bots and fraud?
As someone paying for advertising space, why do I need to spend time and money just figuring out which of your placements are bot traffic to exclude them, and which of your publishers are just arbitraging taboola's traffic?
Arbitrageurs bother me a lot. You're certainly about that.
Unfortunately, a lot of bad behavior in ads is desired by every piece of the chain: adtech companies, exchanges, publishers, advertisers, and consumers who do not want to pay for entertainment.
App install ads are one example of this. Relatively bad for consumers but good for every other link in the chain. Some of the largest blue-chip companies you've heard of buy these things.
Of course Arbitrage bothers you a lot, it means that you aren't capturing the full value of the impressions you sell/broker.
Bad behavior is not desired by performance advertisers.
The blue chip advertisers you refer too are getting wined and dined by agencies and ad tech companies swindling them into believing it's impossible to quantify emotion and storytelling and brand building. After all, it's not their money, it's their shareholders money.
Find me one media buyer, where its actually his own money that doesn't demand accountability.
What kills me is that letting this bad behavior thrive is short sighted. It's great for keeping VCs happy about growth, but at the end of the day, it devalues all your other high value inventory and forces advertisers to underwrite the risk in their bidding.
It's really bad for business long term...but as long as VCs fund publishers and ad tech companies their incentive is only short term growth and bots and fraud help those numbers.
Someone, Somewhere needs to force accountability on every piece of the chain, or we'll continue down this path where 99% of advertising isn't working.
The idea that media purchasers don't track return on ad spend is utterly disconnected from any reality in the adtech industry.
Here's what actually happens: a DSP is given a $30-$50k trial buy from either a company or their agency. While it's certainly true that a dsp is expected to spend the entire budget, the returns on that budget are carefully tracked. If you don't perform, you get $0 next quarter. If you do perform, you call the buyer and demand 2x the budget next quarter where the entire justification is the cost-per-[conversion, click, etc] that you delivered.
You can make data tell any story you want with enough creativity.
They use ridiculous attribution modeling to justify all sorts of ROI that doesnt really exist. They aren't actually truly measuring impact, they are justifying an expense where there are no ramifications if their modeling doesn't reflect reality.
I worked for a company that lived and died by paid media. If something really didn't work, people lost their jobs. Without that level of accountability...it is just a bunch of BS people sell themselves to justify their decisions and/or make themselves look good.
You and I both know that ad tech spin data in all sorts of ways to make them look good.
I mean, do you really think a below the fold, unseen ad impression that was delivered to someone who bought 3 weeks later should get any credit for that sale?
Do the exchanges report on view through conversions? Of course they do...
Even, an above the fold impression, that was seen by a human being, is still 90% of the time ignored by ad blindness, but if that guy buys 29 days later, they'll still call it ROI.
Let's not pretend there is true accountability in digital media today. We both know thats just not true.
Edit: I thought I was replying to someone else and said "your exchange and corrected it to the exchanges."
Conversion modeling has it's issues, but run eg a state-wide geo fenced test and the ads work. And, again, all fraud and/or fake conversions or whatever it is you believe is rampant gets priced into what companies pay for ads.
With 0% fraud you can pay up to (discount x conversion value) / (ad count). With fraud, the numerator doesn't change. Buyers just spend less on ads.
There's lots of ad buyers making lots of money buying ads and they're going to keep making lots of money buying those ads.
And, to repeat myself, the idea that buyers don't push on how conversions are calculated plus run their own calculations is true only in a fantasy world.
This causes adverse selection which devalues high value impressions, which ultimately means more of the advertisers money is wasted on fraud, arbitrage, and poor placements. You can assume that it's all good because they price it into their bids...but if you really think about it, a 3% conversion rate is a 97% failure rate. This massive inefficiency should not exist in todays world of Machine Learning...problem is, the stakeholders all benefit from bad behavior.
> the idea that buyers don't push on how conversions are calculated plus run their own calculations is true only in a fantasy world.
This is true in a broad sense, but those "conversions" are not always based on whats actually driving sales.
Everyone wants to be in a defensible position, so they push for accountability...but its not real accountability, it is anecdotal storytelling that aligns with their interests instead of the bottom line sales.
I have clients that are publishers who only want to show growth in unique sessions.
I have clinical trial clients who want to make sure their executives and shareholders see their ad, Retailers constantly force manufacturers to invest in TV, OOH and other media in order to even get shelf space, big brands are spending money on the recommendations of kids a year out of college who got dazzled, wined&dined, and flattered by account executives at agencies and ad tech providers, or their friends who got a job at a hot new startup.
The incentives to truly be disciplined instead of just telling a good anecdotal story simply don't exist in the real world. It only exists in private companies where the decision maker is spending his own money and actually knows better.
I really hope you don't believe that digital advertising today is mostly accountable to statistically significant and disciplined calculations about direct correlation and indirect impact on sales. They spin their tales with data that makes everyone feel good, but doesn't really reflect the true impact of their advertising.
It is an industry with incentives aligned with all sorts of things besides true performance.
Worse is the first party data movement that is essentially tricking brands into spending money they dont need to spend to drive sales they would get anyway.
Find me an ad tech company who says, well save you money and Ill trust them. Find me an ad tech company that says, start with $50k and than next month well do $30k for the same volume of sales and leads... and ill trust them.
For now, they all say well make you money, and than they scam their way into taking a piece of a pie they never really earned.
The thing is the stakeholders do not benefit from bad behavior. For the reasons you enumerated above (adverse selection, etc). I'm not sure how you fail to connect the dots. Google, for example, is very aggressive about ad fraud. We all would love to completely end ad fraud because it would get us paid more. I've told you this. Large ad buyers in this thread have told you this.
Mocking 3% conversion rates (a 97% failure rate) is dumb. The world is stochastic.
You think because you have crappy clients that all ad buyers are incompetent? Or that giant cpg companies waste their ad spending, or have never thought to run tests around it?
I think this entire conversation has reinforced my prior that people calling themselves "Thought Leaders" are anything but.
I don't really know where you fit in the ad world, so I can't uncover your bias...but one of the largest ad buyers in the world, Machine Zone's own CEO talks about the blatant fraud throughout the ad world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXBqzpExvrk
I never said all ad buyers are incompetent. Performance advertisers are very disciplined, but most of the ad world is not performance ad buying.
If you were truly honest with yourself you would know how often data is manipulated to tell an anecdotal story or support a clearly biased outcome.
To learn more about cognitive biases and how to properly use data.
------------------
I am not saying that advertising doesn't work or that you cant turn a profit with all the fraud, or even that a 3% conversion rate is bad...
I am just saying if it doesn't get you pissed to see all the waste, you are part of the problem, not the solution. I will never stop trying to improve results...its a stupid cop out to say, "we price fraud into our bids."
For what its worth, the stakeholders do benefit from the bad behavior. Ad tech companies are struggling...realizing their fancy data and algorithms don't justify the price they need to charge. They are forced to show growth to their investors, so they turn a blind eye to fraud and bots. They pay it lipservice, and thats it.
Ad agencies are using archaic billing models from 70 years ago, and are essentially sales organizations forced to get ad spend up and willing to do anything to justify that spend.
The big brands are not demanding a fully closed feedback loop. They are using tests for things like Lift and all sorts of correlated data that doesn't really reflect true accountability.
There is so much BS being spun in the digital marketing world and 3/4 of the industry would be out of work if they were all honest with themselves and where they are going.
Google and Facebook are the only two ad tech players who have sustainable models. all the other ad tech companies are stealing from peter to pay paul and most will eventually crumble and fall.
re: your personal attacks and your beliefs about thought leaders? Ask yourself this. who is questioning the status quo and who is defending it? Thought Leaders break away from the pack and ask the tough questions.
You are of course welcome to disagree with my viewpoints. But that doesn't make me wrong and you right. Things are never that black and white. We both have sincere and legitimate perspectives and as long as we are discussing it, its a useful conversation.
I feel like your attacks mean you are on the defensive. I apologize for upsetting you. I obviously don't know you and had no intention of attacking you or putting you on the defensive.
In a similar vain, I am not saying everyone is a corrupt crook. I actually think most of the people in digital marketing are sincere in their beliefs...From my perspective though, many of them are blinded by self interest and can't really see the forest from the trees.
Every advertiser I ever worked with demanded accountability, but 9/10 times it was more about having good news to deliver up the food chain and not about actually succeeding. When I watched ad strategies failing leading to job layoffs, I realized that this isn't some game to just throw money at, and find data to make you look good. Marketing is very serious, and its time people started questioning everything from pricing transparency in...
If you buy ads on adx / high quality networks, it certainly minimizes the pain. That plus a little human review of top demand partners and you'll be ok. If you want to go after every scrap of traffic and chase bottom tier ad networks, you get what you get. And from the perspective of an ad buyer, the fraud gets priced into what they pay anyway.
You are right and, much like in the case of the War on Drugs, the solution to the perceived problem (people's desire for something addictive and "suboptimal") cannot be only at the supply side. Whenever there is an unsatisfied demand there is a potential for profit and the niche gets promptly occupied by entrepreneurs.
However we could strive to do something much better.
The Internet as a whole and the www in particular were born with the goal of being a redundant, indestructible media for communication between distant parts of the globe and to guarantee the exchange of information and knowledge even in the event of a big part of mankind getting obliterated by a nuclear war.
It is a miracle that these characters, being typed on a smartphone, are traveling the whole globe wirelessly, via copper cables, optical fibers and reaching all these good people reading it right now.
We (mankind as a whole, technicians and builders in particular) should not rationalize our behaviour as something unavoidable.
There is profit to be made helping people get their fix (of cheap information, misleading bits and other inanities), I'm a 100% ok with that but keeping in our thoughts that we could also be doing something much better and greater with this miracle we created and received from our elders.
This is a mirror view of another phenomenon - Google and Facebook are sucking up more of the ad revenue. They're over half of all online ad revenue now, and climbing.
Google's solution to web spam has been to go into the web spam business and monetize it. Search Google for "credit card". The entire first screen is Google ads for marginal credit card providers. Five years ago, the top results were for many of the same marginal credit card providers, but they were organic results not monetized by Google.
So with Google having taken over the most profitable parts of web spam, the remaining players are fighting over the scraps. That's what this article is about.
143 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadGoogle's introduction of AMP looks to me like a direct attack on Taboola and the ad exchanges. You can read a lot of major news outlets now without your mobile phone choking.
Google's fraud department is very aggressive. Publishers maybe get away with sending low quality traffic through to Adsense/Doubleclick for a while, but traffic brokers will mix fraudulent traffic in, only Google will catch it, and then the publisher ends up with a very large negative account balance.
There are some separate issues with very bad quality sites and mobile apps ending up in Google's platform. This wasn't the case years ago. Much of it is from sites with buzz and viral in the domains and is coming from Facebook. It is real, but the clicks are maybe 100% accidental and the smart pricing algorithms are not punishing it like they should.
The correct conclusion of this article is that media publishers who have relied on huge volumes of un-targeted, non-retaining, mediocre traffic with shitloads of display ads/auto play video ads/etc are running out of time. The platforms which serve them may be over valued by a lot.
Google+Youtube and Facebook are the big winners. The ad dollar share will shift back to them. They can deliver ads through their mobile apps in a way that is not easily blockable even at the network level. Future ads delivered through voice interfaces (Siri, Alexa) and messaging platforms (Snapchat, FB Messenger) are going to make ad blocking more of a non-issue as content & ad blend together. Maybe at some point you stick a Magic Leap in your eyeball and an AI auto-blocks anything suspected to be paid for to your retina while noise cancelling headphones kill the audio stream, but that isn't a near-future issue for now.
There is a whole separate issue regarding Google's increasing replacement of organic results with basically just ads. Google may be in a very, very tight position to meet their quarterly numbers and could start missing.
Within the insular world of tech people, it all seems so absurd that anyone would be interested in following these ads and click-bait articles, but the truth is people enjoy that sort of content. This is why gossip magazines sell like hot cakes.
I am not sure what the solution is. People like all sorts of things that are bad for them.
I avoid these ads in print. It is easy to not read magazine or skip the back ads. I don't even feel that I give the front ads of the New Yorker or the Economist much of my attention. I can easily passively avoid ads in print.
Online, ads have become highly annoying and detract from the experience of website in a way that does not happen in print.
I am not saying that I entirely avoid print ads. Back in the day of Creative Computing and Byte Magazine, I would pour over the ads as much as the editorial content. The ads were interesting to me.
The difference is, we all use the web, where as we don't all read People Magazine. Such is the nature of the great democracy.
The solution isn't to get rid of the Ads, it is to get rid of the perversion of the system (easier said than done). An efficient ad system is better for everybody.
To their credit, many of the DSPs (at least AppNexus) are trying to clean up their own systems as well and automatically block this type of traffic from being purchased. The trend in ad-tech right now around viewability and viewable eCPM metrics is also a step in the right direction.
For example, I would pay 99 cents for a full story after reading a teaser if this was easy to do. I'd even buy a membership if I could trust that a news org isn't pushing an agenda (looking at you, NYT, WaPo and many others). Heck, maybe crowdfunding select journalists is the key. I know organizations are trying to think out of the box, but because ads are still giving them a cushion I charge that they are not trying hard enough.
Huh. Such an obvious thing I've never even considered.
Wouldn't it be a net benefit if those sites closed down? It's not like there's much value being lost.
They do work, but not very well. Think about the false positives. How many people accidentally click an ad? Even on HN, where the crowd is very tech-savvy, people always complain about it. Now imagine average users.
The fact that there are people who click on ads on purpose is a given. Otherwise ads wouldn't exist. That's why no one talks about it: it's like saying the sky is blue. It doesn't add anything to the conversation.
Still, I do not know what to do about it. It is the bane of minority to be at the will of the majority.
I'm not saying that this boycott will catch on and change the world. It's just my own little war.
It's not because I'm in tech that I am wise to their tricks. It's because of my writing background. I have only bits and pieces of evidence from my own non-tech friends, but I'm pretty sure most people are aware that ads and clickbait are manipulative and that gossip magazines are the linguistic equivalent of junk food and bad for the heart.And while I said I was dismayed to see the old guard like Time and USA Today adopt the tactic of clickbait, most disconcerting of all is to see everyday people start to adopt it. I've seen quite a few blog posts and Medium articles posted on HN with clickbait titles. And on a certain video production forum, I see members starting threads with clickbait subjects (something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!"). Forum members get no money for clicks. So why do they do it? Maybe they just want some attention. But I'm a little worried that it's just unconscious imitation, that clickbaiting is catching on like a bad habit.
Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again. Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!".
However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their products are sometimes actually useful to you!
Can you think of an example? Make one up, I don't mean scour the internet for one. I thought about what you said and I can't think of an instance where the crappy clickbait headlines we're used to seeing would actually be a well-descriptive headline for its content.
Like, I can't think of an instance where something like "I bought this camera, and you won't believe what happened!" [or other clickbait formats] is a reasonable descriptor for its content, where you just can't write title without titling it like that.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you?
Perhaps he's suggesting that otherwise honest people have to resort to clickbait tactics to compete with the worsening signal-to-noise ratio
Exactly. Imagine that you are a pristine expert in your subject and want to share your knowledge. Now, you want to write a well-researched article and post it on your blog, think what title will you give it?
If its a plain old title like "Acme stock is down by 5%", that won't be doing justice to your well-researched article. Maybe, you have got insights about technical/fundamental analyses about Acme stock that the rest of the professionals don't? Unless you give it a catchy title like "10 reasons to avoid Acme stock" or "Unpredictable mess lie ahead of Acme", no one is going to read your article (although it deserves to be read by millions).
tldr; Even a good product needs marketing sometimes.
It's easy. The headline should tell the whole story:
There is no mystery ("Acme Widget stock makes startling change"). While there's not much room for detail, still: 1) I know what the article is about, 2) I know whether I would be interested in the rest, and 3) I can get a summary of the day's happenings just by skimming the headlines. This was the original purpose of headlines and one of the main reasons for the article itself following a structure called the Inverted Pyramid. The headline told the whole story, just in outline. The first sentence of the article told the whole story again, just with a little more detail. The first paragraph covered the whole story again, in yet more detail. Want more details? Keep reading paragraphs. You can stop at any time. Your only loss is some detail. Compare that to the circuitous, long-winded introductions of many blogs, where the writer finally gets to the point about two thirds through.Clickbait deliberately withholds information, instead of giving all it can in the room that it has. Clickbait churns up questions, headlines give answers. Clickbait lures you into a story that, in the end, was not interesting to you. Headlines help you know whether the story will be interesting to you or not.
Is it clickbait? How would you retitle this article? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/upshot/the-jobs-report-is-...
If you read the article, the reasons he gives for "why the jobs report is not quite as terrible as it looks" is a hodgepodge of unrelated things: (a) the report's margin of error is 100,000; (b) a three-month average is better; (c) a wave of people are retiring; and (d) "as the economy approaches full employment, jobs growth must slow."
It's hard to summarize it better than: "The Jobs Report Is Not Quite as Terrible as It Looks Because . . . It's Complicated" (haha) or maybe "The Jobs Report Is Down From Last Time But As Expected for a Mature Economy." More descriptive, but kind of a clunker. I didn't say writing tight headlines was easy.
Either way, I am not irritated at all by the original headline, because it gives me an accurate indication of whether I would read the rest of the article. In my case, I wouldn't. I look at the economy like the weather: complex, hard to predict, and of little effect on me unless it's really bad.
I agree. Sometimes you're in the mood for a rambling essay. Some things are complicated or indeterminate and cannot be easily summed up.I think you might be stating your opinion as fact. Clearly there are a lot of people in web publishing who disagree. Also, we're talking about link titles not headlines.
I'm not in web publishing but still I'd argue that the whole point of a link title is to get you to click on it. Just like the whole point of the design on your cereal box is to get you to buy that one instead of some other box. One link title can be measurably better than another by counting how many clicks each one gets.
How about if the title is manipulating me to try to get me to click on it in order to make money from me doing so, even though it's going to waste my time? Is that a moral issue?
This is a real problem, because people end up remembering (and believing) the bullshit they read in a headline, without ever realizing that the actual article debunked that statement.
I think we're still conflating link titles and headlines--they serve different functions. Link titles exist to get you to click through to the article. I'd argue that they should not have misleading information in it, but they should be enticing, and specifically, they should NOT summarize the contents of the article (otherwise why would anyone even click through?) Headlines are the first thing you see when you do click through to an article, and should nicely summarize the article so you don't have to stay long on the page to get the gist of what it's about.
Totally agree with you on not putting bullshit in a headline! As a reader I want a summary of the article so I don't need to stay long.
They're the same thing everywhere I go: Google News, Hacker News, newspaper websites, articles reposted on Facebook . . . Where are you going that they're different?
> they should NOT summarize the contents of the article (otherwise why would anyone even click through?)
For the details. If an article is interesting to me, I will click it. Won't you?
- Arch Linux adopts systemd - More and more developers trying out Rust - Useful shell one-liners
I would click each of these. They're a little vague, but I made them up in a hurry. Still, I my clickbait radar would not have gone off on any of them.
There are three kinds of stories: 1) the kind I want to read in depth (like on programming or photography), 2) the kind I want to know usually just the gist (like the economy, politics, world news), and 3) the kind I don't even care to know the gist about (like some celebrity gossip, a diet fad that the writer already knows is ineffectual, etc.)
I just want the headline to convey whether, after I read the whole article, I will think it was worth it. The problem with clickbait is that it arouses your curiosity for everything, but at the end you feel the same way you feel after eating candy.
"User posts interesting observation on website. The last paragraph implies a terrifying view into the future."
I think (hope? fear?) that it is mostly imitation. We start learning language by imitation and we never really stop. Will the clickbait we learn today go away again our stay with us?
Pre-radio newspaper headlines are notorious for their crazy front page headlines. It would be interesting to analyze everyday writing from that time for traces of the front page style. If present, did those patterns go away again or did they shape language as we use it today?
Small businesses are foolish for advertising like this, especially ppc. Large business may be able to get some sort of successful branding out of it I suppose.
No one seems to mention the exceedingly obvious, without which the whole discussion is rendered moot. The fact that someone, somewhere is clicking an ad is not lost us, but we've moved on to a higher level discussion.
This is why Google and Facebook are kings in the online advertising world, because the have mastered the art of showing ads to people that are most likely to care. Heck, Google Search doesn't even show ads at all in their search pages if they figured you never click on them.
In practice this is hard to do without troves of user behaviour data, but the approach that companies like Taboola and Outbrain take of showing irrelevant ads to everyone visiting is definitively not the solution, and if anything it's only going to diminish the efficacy of online ads further in the long run.
I suspect it would be more realistic to say "they work at least very slightly better than the less attention-grabby-information-zero headlines".
If they worked very well there wouldn't need to be so many of them per page and for articles carrying them to be split into so many single paragraph pages (because enough money would be made that the site owner would start considering design and UX factors as much as getting that extra 0.0000000001$ per page impression).
Just because people use it so much it kills them doesn't mean it provides value to them.
Just because clickbait preys on our nature doesn't make it valuable.
Easy to argue that by choosing manipulation over substance for the sole reason of generating revenue that you are not providing value, you are more of a rent seeker, not providing anything new of value but rather seeking rents on existing content. Seeing as most clickbait is "Top 10 Things Our Underpaid Interns Stole From Other Sites: You won't believe #7!", the rent seeking analogy is kinda decent.
If these people started visiting another part of the web, "Ad Tech" would immediately re-emerge there too. The tigers just follow the herds of wild buffalos.
So, yes, watch out, if you can see wild buffalos, that means indeed that the tigers cannot be far away.
The article wants to jeopardize the god-given right of some of the manipulators to manipulate the manipulable crowds.
"Ad dollars are being stolen from publishers who actually put in an effort to create original, useful content. This is very wrong."
Ha ha ha hah ha!
Apparently, there are legitimate and illegitimate manipulators. The good and the bad thieves! The good and the bad burglars!
They are in a daggers-drawn contest on who exactly has the right to rip off the idiots!
Yes, good question, who is the one who legitimately "owns" these idiots?
I'm a sucker for irony :)
Most affiliates get paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, so they're actually extremely disincentivized from buying against laundered traffic because it doesn't perform well.
Jamie, I don't understand what you mean by laundered traffic.
The clicks generated by click-baits, advertorials, etc you see on the sites the study mentioned are real, non-bot traffic.
The ads you see there do in fact direct to shell sites, more commonly referred to as "bridge" pages. All these sites do is create a conversion funnel that starts with (for example) priming the reader about "fit girls" and end up in an advertorial for a diet pill.
It's not affiliate marketing per se, as nowadays companies have their own media buyers, but the fact is that businesses that are profitable enough to profit from high volume, high chargeback rates are shady business that are usually very active in affiliate marketing and CPA-networks. AKA, loans, insurance, diet pills, etc.
So yes, it's not affiliate marketing, it's actually shady businesses. But it's easy to make a single business compliant and run "good ads", whereas it's not that easy to make thousands of affiliate compliant. And that's where you see the problem.
These affiliates are the ones that turn to shady tactics and click-baits, etc (which is simple a strategy to increase click-through-rates) to maximize their profit.
"visitors are sent to low-end websites. But if you happen to be of high value to the ad tech industry (based on your IP), you’ll be redirected through a loop of various shell websites, spending a fraction of a second on each, in order to increase the apparent quality of these websites’ audience."
Advertisers are in full control of assigning value to a traffic source by way of demographic targeting and bidding... Either the Advertisers are still profiting over the whole interaction or they're bidding too much for their traffic. It's not the middle men who are to blame.
People don't have a problem with arbitrage. It's just the annoying ads when you're surfing the net.
1) When I bought something on Amazon, they would advertise products other than the exact one I just purchased.
2) There was a chrome app which would, every week, ask me what personal projects I was working on and then replace the existing ads I saw with ads that would be relevant to the problems I'm willing to spend money on.
On top of that you get paid a few cents for answering the questions, which can accumulate pretty fast. I hate to sound like a shill, but I've been using the app and I never pay for Android Play apps anymore just because of credits accumulated through surveys I have answered. And I don't even take any of the questions that will add to my Ad profile, so I've actually been skipping about 80% of them.
Probably 98% of the time the correct answer is "none of the above" so that's what I pick and I get my 5-10cents. Occasionally I can tell that it's a survey that someone commissioned (asking about how likely you are to vote in some primary, etc) and I do tend to answer those as well.
Overall in the time I've had the app I've collected $60.19 (just checked history). Granted, this is from two years of use but it's good pocket change for Play Store purchases (hey, that $1.49 icon pack or watch face I wouldn't normally bother with? Purchase.)
I guess on some level I understand that like radio or free alt-weeklies, they sell access to eyeballs and earholes in order to fund the services I actually make use of. If they're gonna analyze my usage to try to determine which things are relevant and cut down on spam and wasted ad expenditures, I might as well make a few bucks from it in the process.
And as you say, sometimes I get one that I don't want to answer and it's pretty clearly laid out so I can decline.
Yes, I think that's the point of the app. It's basically selling to customers (businesses) more direct access to information that it'd normally gather through tracking or not at all. It's an interesting model in that it's a bit more transparent, and it does pay the customer directly. I wonder if we'll start seeing more of that in the future, where users actually "sell" their eyeballs directly.
It just sounds more honest to me.
[1] http://www.adlimiter.com
I think a major change needs to happen. Advertising is falling to rock bottom, ad blockers are on the rise, and I think we're going to see more and more online apps and content sites going out of business.
Users need to start paying for the sites they visit. Why do people pay $2 for a simple mobile app they only use 2 or 3 times, but they refuse to pay a news site they read daily, that has a staff of writers and high quality content? I wonder if we'll see the majority of the internet behind a pay wall one day, where every site gives you a small preview of content or limited features, and you pay for full access.
This is completely false. The most relevant ad (statistically, based on real data) is going to be around something you actually want to buy, likely from a brand or product you saw recently, or are already a customer of. An e-book to lose 10 lbs in 10 days might be the best ad for someone who is in-market for short-term weight loss solutions, but is going to be a terrible ad for most people.
They're not mutually exclusive. If they were, the internet would be plastered with mortgage ads.
I don't see how this would work, except for the paragraph that follows in the article talking about "laundering" traffic to make it appear higher quality, so maybe they get good money for their ads? But still, CPC is generally not cheap compared to CPM.
Exactly. An advertiser like Walmart won't buy ads on a porn site so toastedballs is buying ads on porn sites then showing the high quality users from those sites ads from legitimate companies.
On your page (i.e. the page where people go if they click your ads), you host advertising from others - that advertising might be pay-per-click or pay per 1000 (CPM).
The numbers: So lets say you pay 5c for 1000 ads and you get 50 visits to your site, or to think of it another way $1 gets you 1000 visitors to your site.
That means that you either need to find a cost-per-1000 advertiser that is over $1 per 1000, or you need to find an advertiser that pays enough per-click on their ads to cover that $1 cost, e.g. if you get a 1% click-through rate on the ads on your site, that $1 to get 1000 visitors will also get you 10 ad clicks, so if you can find a pay-per-click advertiser that offers more than 10c per click, you're making money.
The big magic was basically video ads on the ad exchange. The advertisers paid more and had no actionable metrics to track, much less tracking clicks. There is some smart pricing, so the CPMs do get driven down, but not to 0.
The hard part to this is what happens when you don't get paid or worse you get a bill going back months for money already paid out.
There are numerous services that offer indie musicians batches of clicks or followers or what have you. I stay far away from all that because, in hard terms, I want to track organic metrics. Well that and the general principle of thinking pay-for-fake-listens is essentially gutter-trash dishonest behavior. Others...obviously don't feel the same, so the industry exists.
- Java vs Scala - The JVM Battle...
- Elasticsearch vs SOLR within AWS...
> It also have remarkably little user interaction with its content.
Who is Kalkis Research? How am I supposed to take them seriously?
- Content promotion is different than display ads, at least in terms of how receptive the audience is to buying. There's lots of research around this (nobody trusts display ads).
- Most content promo widgets run way below the fold and are a last squeeze on the traffic before it leaves your site. The alternative to not running it is earning nothing, not swapping it out. Generally you've already flashed your own related content widget at the visitor.
- You may hate it but... you clicked on it. We're giving you what you want. If you like looking at stupid cat pictures (or worse), someone will give you stupid cat pictures. We're not paid to provide moral or intellectual censorship...
- Old School Traffic Washing... so what? You take a bunch of junk traffic and filter it into real humans who are in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind. Often with some level of intelligence about what they are interested in, via the stuff they click on. That's actually a good ad audience.
Seriously, do Google display advertisers reduce their rates because the last search on Google was for "my filthy secret"? No, that space runs at the same rate.
What's next, you gonna ban advertising from stupid TV shows too? There's stuff on cable that's easily as bad as many click-bait sites, in terms of intellectual content.
As long as it's not a bot and the brand ad is running next to content appropriate for a brand ad, not seeing what the problem is here. If you don't like it, don't place it on your site or click on it.
[I'd be more outraged about pop-ups and toolbar widgets; that IS a UX interruption and often non-consensual...]
You tell me once, I need X, I won't care. You tell me ten times a day I need X, I might get tired. Color me pessimistic, but people in general just need to be told with clear words over and over what to do and without a strong independent or stubborn mind they will follow.
<I think we've finally found skynet. They live at Outbrain.>
Yes, my brain has a weak spot for cat pictures, but I don't want to have it challenged all the time.
That's true to an extent, but go to your Facebook feed (if you have one), find a clickbait article and (without clicking on it) read the comments below.
Almost invariably, there will be someone complaining that they clicked the link out of curiosity then quickly left after discovering how abysmally horrible the user experience is.
Some of the sites literally (as in literally) make you go to a new page of ads for each sentence you read. Their whole business model is to trick you into loading the ads in your browser and showing you as many as possible before you give up.
So it's a bit of an oversimplification to say people are clicking on these links because they want to. People buy snake oil because they want to.
Clickbait articles have low quality content. It's usually hard to judge article quality by the link's title. Most people are tired of being misled into trashy websites.
The only reason any of this makes any money is because there is money to be made in pretending it's 1995.
As others have pointed out before, I don't think we'll be losing much of great value and there are a huge variety of alternative revenue models available for user-supported content.
And good riddance. If I go the rest of my like and never see another ad, that will be fine with me. Same goes for just about all the free content I currently consume. Won't miss it.
>we are due for a correction in the sector of ad-supported content.
In my opinion, the problem is with the ad tech companies themselves more than the free-content internet.
I don't think the free-content is the problem as much as the incentive of ad tech companies and ad agencies to ignore or perpetuate fraud, arbitrage and gaming the system, and the branding advertisers who are too dumb to demand real accountability.
Essentially, all these VC backed ad-tech companies need to show growth, so they want the fraud, bots and low quality ad impressions.
Big brand advertisers fool themselves into thinking the quality of the placement is less important than reaching the right people, so they keep on paying for garbage impressions, feeding these unsustainable ad tech companies, without demanding bottom line accountability for measurable results.
and... Ad agencies are compensated with an archaic model from back in the day when they earned commission from the publishers, so they want as much ad spend as possible. Plus, they like be treating like kings by the VC-backed ad tech companies.
It's all one big party, where the consumers suffer and the legit, performance advertisers suffer.
There is still, despite over 3000 marketing tech startups, no one really serving the ad buyers needs in a significant way.
we don't need another bid algorithm or vanity metric system... we need ad tech that systematically roots out bots, fraud, and is accountable to bottom line results for advertisers instead of acting as a broker that makes money regardless.
Build that tech and you will have a billion dollar company.
Is this even a real site?
a) Only the 3 posts about Google are free. The other articles have very short descriptions and say you can buy them for €10,000. The thumbnail image accompanying the buy link is the same in all. They may not even exist.
b) For all the details and charts in the Google pieces, they say "BEARISH -70%" but have absolutely no math or estimation about how they came to that conclusion.
c) The authors are pointing out fraud largely outside of Google's traffic ecosystem -- ad exchanges, content recommendation ad networks -- but some how Google is the company that will lose half of its value. They couldn't be bothered to look at other public adtech companies?
e) What they outline definitely with regards to worthless ads being sold is definitely real, occurring, and I'm not contesting that.
I did notice that the writing came off as rather amateurish. It was a little too aggressive and salesy to feel legit.
Edit: to & too
Why would I use an unreliable public source of data if I have you right here. How about sharing some screenshots from your Google Analytics account?
I still agree with the top thread that this isn't a "real" site, and speculate that it's just trying to drive PageRank to the long list of "spammy" sites linked multiple times in the article (via Hacker News).
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/42995?hl=en
so... you get accused of singling out google, so then you point out you "mentioned" youtube? you do know who owns youtube, right? give me $10,000 and i'll send you my report on who owns youtube.
you're an idiot.
As a senior buy-side ad guy who has been in the space for a long time, here's my $.02 for what it is worth:
- Click/impression/view fraud are big problems. Viewability solutions are still nascent, but improving. Google and Facebook are both fairly uniquely positioned (due to their data advantages) to continue getting better at cleaning things up.
- People who think Google in particular is interested in perpetuating ad fraud aren't thinking things through to conclusion. The reason advertisers like myself spend as much as we do is because from what we can see in the data, it is profitable. Display is arguably less measurable (yada yada attribution yada), but Google is fiercely protective of their ad quality. Being recognized as a source of quality traffic that drives profit is Google's moat. If they could instantly kill all fraudulent traffic they would do it in a heartbeat because they know it would mean even more spend from advertisers who find them to be even more profitable. This is of greater importance now moreso than ever before with the rise of FB and FB's gains on the mobile advertising front.
- There is a lot of thrashing and consolidation occurring in the display ecosystem. There is a major shift that has been in the making for years where advertisers are focusing more and more on "audiences" vs. "placements." Thus, whomever has the better audience data will be better positioned. Google has significantly better audience data than most ad networks and exchanges out there. A lot of the highest quality data is 1st party data living in someone's DMP or CRM, and Google has opened up tools for onboarding those audiences much like FB has (yay lookalike targeting!). Not that they didn't know who people were already.
- The sell-side has significant pressure from the buy-side to clean up their act. Unless they are doing some sketchy arbitrage, 99% of ad buyers want to stamp out fraudulent traffic. Publishers who can't survive without it are not long for this world. Ultimately there are significant interests and dollars behind killing fraud.
- Ad fraud will always exist in some form. That's why it is a number's game as well as a game of whack-a-mole.
But yes, back to the original point--let's please not read too much into this...ahem..."well-sourced research."
Clickbait articles service people who want them: people who are looking for quick payoff content.
And that's most people. US Weekly, People Magazine –– this is all clickbait. Even programs like NBC's Today Show and Tonight Show: dashed-off, quick-hit, prefab bits––each of which is probably actually an ad, for something. And in between those ads, there are––wait for it––more ads. Most of media is clickbait and has been for a very long time. Even for Hacker News readers, reading solely The Economist can get boring after a while. (A real short while, if you ask me.) There's nothing wrong with fun.[1]
I see some people here concerned that clickbait sites are wasting advertisers' dollars, but that isn't true, either. Advertisers do not purchase ads on websites. They purchase audiences. BMW wants BMW intenders, and doesn't (within a reasonable bound) care in which app or on which site it can locate them. BMW buyers don't watch exploding watermelons? Nonsense! That's why adtech exists––because finding the right people is vastly more important than the distinct complexion of the publication itself. [2]
[1] http://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
[2] Of course, there are good and bad ways to find the right people. I admit that readily.
As someone paying for advertising space, why do I need to spend time and money just figuring out which of your placements are bot traffic to exclude them, and which of your publishers are just arbitraging taboola's traffic?
Unfortunately, a lot of bad behavior in ads is desired by every piece of the chain: adtech companies, exchanges, publishers, advertisers, and consumers who do not want to pay for entertainment.
App install ads are one example of this. Relatively bad for consumers but good for every other link in the chain. Some of the largest blue-chip companies you've heard of buy these things.
Bad behavior is not desired by performance advertisers.
The blue chip advertisers you refer too are getting wined and dined by agencies and ad tech companies swindling them into believing it's impossible to quantify emotion and storytelling and brand building. After all, it's not their money, it's their shareholders money.
Find me one media buyer, where its actually his own money that doesn't demand accountability.
What kills me is that letting this bad behavior thrive is short sighted. It's great for keeping VCs happy about growth, but at the end of the day, it devalues all your other high value inventory and forces advertisers to underwrite the risk in their bidding.
It's really bad for business long term...but as long as VCs fund publishers and ad tech companies their incentive is only short term growth and bots and fraud help those numbers.
Someone, Somewhere needs to force accountability on every piece of the chain, or we'll continue down this path where 99% of advertising isn't working.
Here's what actually happens: a DSP is given a $30-$50k trial buy from either a company or their agency. While it's certainly true that a dsp is expected to spend the entire budget, the returns on that budget are carefully tracked. If you don't perform, you get $0 next quarter. If you do perform, you call the buyer and demand 2x the budget next quarter where the entire justification is the cost-per-[conversion, click, etc] that you delivered.
They use ridiculous attribution modeling to justify all sorts of ROI that doesnt really exist. They aren't actually truly measuring impact, they are justifying an expense where there are no ramifications if their modeling doesn't reflect reality.
I worked for a company that lived and died by paid media. If something really didn't work, people lost their jobs. Without that level of accountability...it is just a bunch of BS people sell themselves to justify their decisions and/or make themselves look good.
You and I both know that ad tech spin data in all sorts of ways to make them look good.
I mean, do you really think a below the fold, unseen ad impression that was delivered to someone who bought 3 weeks later should get any credit for that sale?
Do the exchanges report on view through conversions? Of course they do...
Even, an above the fold impression, that was seen by a human being, is still 90% of the time ignored by ad blindness, but if that guy buys 29 days later, they'll still call it ROI.
Let's not pretend there is true accountability in digital media today. We both know thats just not true.
Edit: I thought I was replying to someone else and said "your exchange and corrected it to the exchanges."
With 0% fraud you can pay up to (discount x conversion value) / (ad count). With fraud, the numerator doesn't change. Buyers just spend less on ads.
There's lots of ad buyers making lots of money buying ads and they're going to keep making lots of money buying those ads.
And, to repeat myself, the idea that buyers don't push on how conversions are calculated plus run their own calculations is true only in a fantasy world.
This causes adverse selection which devalues high value impressions, which ultimately means more of the advertisers money is wasted on fraud, arbitrage, and poor placements. You can assume that it's all good because they price it into their bids...but if you really think about it, a 3% conversion rate is a 97% failure rate. This massive inefficiency should not exist in todays world of Machine Learning...problem is, the stakeholders all benefit from bad behavior.
> the idea that buyers don't push on how conversions are calculated plus run their own calculations is true only in a fantasy world.
This is true in a broad sense, but those "conversions" are not always based on whats actually driving sales.
Everyone wants to be in a defensible position, so they push for accountability...but its not real accountability, it is anecdotal storytelling that aligns with their interests instead of the bottom line sales.
I have clients that are publishers who only want to show growth in unique sessions.
I have clinical trial clients who want to make sure their executives and shareholders see their ad, Retailers constantly force manufacturers to invest in TV, OOH and other media in order to even get shelf space, big brands are spending money on the recommendations of kids a year out of college who got dazzled, wined&dined, and flattered by account executives at agencies and ad tech providers, or their friends who got a job at a hot new startup.
The incentives to truly be disciplined instead of just telling a good anecdotal story simply don't exist in the real world. It only exists in private companies where the decision maker is spending his own money and actually knows better.
I really hope you don't believe that digital advertising today is mostly accountable to statistically significant and disciplined calculations about direct correlation and indirect impact on sales. They spin their tales with data that makes everyone feel good, but doesn't really reflect the true impact of their advertising.
It is an industry with incentives aligned with all sorts of things besides true performance.
Worse is the first party data movement that is essentially tricking brands into spending money they dont need to spend to drive sales they would get anyway.
Find me an ad tech company who says, well save you money and Ill trust them. Find me an ad tech company that says, start with $50k and than next month well do $30k for the same volume of sales and leads... and ill trust them.
For now, they all say well make you money, and than they scam their way into taking a piece of a pie they never really earned.
Mocking 3% conversion rates (a 97% failure rate) is dumb. The world is stochastic.
You think because you have crappy clients that all ad buyers are incompetent? Or that giant cpg companies waste their ad spending, or have never thought to run tests around it?
I think this entire conversation has reinforced my prior that people calling themselves "Thought Leaders" are anything but.
I never said all ad buyers are incompetent. Performance advertisers are very disciplined, but most of the ad world is not performance ad buying.
If you were truly honest with yourself you would know how often data is manipulated to tell an anecdotal story or support a clearly biased outcome.
If you really believe most advertisers are disciplined to statistical significance, and demand true accountability from their ad dollars, you should read https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
To learn more about cognitive biases and how to properly use data. ------------------
I am not saying that advertising doesn't work or that you cant turn a profit with all the fraud, or even that a 3% conversion rate is bad...
I am just saying if it doesn't get you pissed to see all the waste, you are part of the problem, not the solution. I will never stop trying to improve results...its a stupid cop out to say, "we price fraud into our bids."
For what its worth, the stakeholders do benefit from the bad behavior. Ad tech companies are struggling...realizing their fancy data and algorithms don't justify the price they need to charge. They are forced to show growth to their investors, so they turn a blind eye to fraud and bots. They pay it lipservice, and thats it.
Ad agencies are using archaic billing models from 70 years ago, and are essentially sales organizations forced to get ad spend up and willing to do anything to justify that spend.
The big brands are not demanding a fully closed feedback loop. They are using tests for things like Lift and all sorts of correlated data that doesn't really reflect true accountability.
There is so much BS being spun in the digital marketing world and 3/4 of the industry would be out of work if they were all honest with themselves and where they are going.
Google and Facebook are the only two ad tech players who have sustainable models. all the other ad tech companies are stealing from peter to pay paul and most will eventually crumble and fall.
re: your personal attacks and your beliefs about thought leaders? Ask yourself this. who is questioning the status quo and who is defending it? Thought Leaders break away from the pack and ask the tough questions.
You are of course welcome to disagree with my viewpoints. But that doesn't make me wrong and you right. Things are never that black and white. We both have sincere and legitimate perspectives and as long as we are discussing it, its a useful conversation. I feel like your attacks mean you are on the defensive. I apologize for upsetting you. I obviously don't know you and had no intention of attacking you or putting you on the defensive.
In a similar vain, I am not saying everyone is a corrupt crook. I actually think most of the people in digital marketing are sincere in their beliefs...From my perspective though, many of them are blinded by self interest and can't really see the forest from the trees.
Every advertiser I ever worked with demanded accountability, but 9/10 times it was more about having good news to deliver up the food chain and not about actually succeeding. When I watched ad strategies failing leading to job layoffs, I realized that this isn't some game to just throw money at, and find data to make you look good. Marketing is very serious, and its time people started questioning everything from pricing transparency in...
Does unsustainable medical costs worry you? Because all they did was price in the malpractice insurance and fraud.
It's just not good enough to say, its ok to pay for fraud because we dont care to fight it.
There is very real opportunity cost for every dollar going to all the stakeholders in the advertising chain.
However we could strive to do something much better.
The Internet as a whole and the www in particular were born with the goal of being a redundant, indestructible media for communication between distant parts of the globe and to guarantee the exchange of information and knowledge even in the event of a big part of mankind getting obliterated by a nuclear war.
It is a miracle that these characters, being typed on a smartphone, are traveling the whole globe wirelessly, via copper cables, optical fibers and reaching all these good people reading it right now.
We (mankind as a whole, technicians and builders in particular) should not rationalize our behaviour as something unavoidable.
There is profit to be made helping people get their fix (of cheap information, misleading bits and other inanities), I'm a 100% ok with that but keeping in our thoughts that we could also be doing something much better and greater with this miracle we created and received from our elders.
Google's solution to web spam has been to go into the web spam business and monetize it. Search Google for "credit card". The entire first screen is Google ads for marginal credit card providers. Five years ago, the top results were for many of the same marginal credit card providers, but they were organic results not monetized by Google.
So with Google having taken over the most profitable parts of web spam, the remaining players are fighting over the scraps. That's what this article is about.