Clickbait and Traffic Laundering: How Ad Tech Is Destroying the Web
kalkis-research.com
kalkis-research.com
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).
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."
- 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.
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 am not sure what the solution is.
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
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:
"Acme Widget stock down 2.5%"
"CERN sientists discover Higgs Boson"
"Smith and Jones tied in polls"
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-...
> How would you retitle this article?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 exchanges to fully closing the feedback loop on lifetime value.
Its time we actually measured everything possible, instead of just enough to impress our bosses.
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.
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."
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.
"Ad dollars are being stolen from publishers who actually put in an effort to create original, useful content. This is very wrong."
This quote taps into the fact that for 10 years you could have a blog or online site of really high quality content (defining quality by originality, accuracy, and presentation) and ads on the site would pay for the organization to present that information. Then about 5 years ago things fell off a cliff and these sites found their AdSense checks drop 80 - 90%.
There are a lot of things at work here however and not all of them were obvious to publishers.
Of course there are "content mills" and "content farms" and "robo content", all names for web sites that were throwing together hundreds or thousands of articles of derivative content. Many it seems driven by the simple idea that you could pay people $1 on mechanical turk to read an article, and paraphrase it as a new article, throw that up on your "news" site and collect $3 to $4 in ad revenue. The more money you put in, the more money you got out, and these things are really huge.
The second was of course that people could "man in the middle" ad networks, buying an ad on one network and selling a dozen ads on a different network. So your Google Ad for "secrets to getting designer shoes at 1/3 the price." linked to your page of a dozen ads for cut rate shoe companies. $1 of ad spend arbitraged into $1.50 or more of ad revenue.
And finally the real poison in the well, Google for years has reported its CPC numbers going down (Cost per click, the amount an advertiser pays Google for an ad). Of course reading the top line and bottom line numbers off their reports will obfuscate it. Google adds more ads on all their properties to boost volume, Google cuts under performing projects to reduce costs, and they buy (or divert) as much traffic as they can to their properties. The end result is they meet their numbers, but the "partner sites", their checks keep going down and down.
It is odd that the CPC value of ads going down, which drives the reduction in revenue at ad supported sites, forces sites into one of two places (after they have cut costs to the bone), they can either get more aggressive about their ads (to get more clicks to replace the revenue) or they can shut down (as Dr. Dobbs did). Or they can add a paywall (which may kill them anyway depending on how it is implemented).
The business model is dying, and greed is helping it along.
We have wonderful things like uBlock and yesScript that allow you to fine-tune your exposure to ads and Javascript with ease. My online experience is wonderful: clutter-free sites, fast loading times and my battery lasts forever due to minimal Javascript exposure.
The web audience has self-selected into two groups now: the ad-consuming and ad-blocking ones. You don't even need to be particularly tech savvy to opt to never see ads again. Nothing to be outraged about.
Even those parallax scrolling sites aren't a problem anymore: the second you see something fly to the left or zoom on you when you try to simply scroll down, reach out to that sweet yesScript button, and bam! - the insanity stops.
The only thing I found no easy answer for is those sticky CSS "navigation toolbars" that so many of sites started to roll out. These ridiculous contraptions sometimes occupy up to 30% of vertical real estate and I haven't found a blocker for those yet. 90% of the time they go away if you turn off Javascript for the offending site using yesScript, and in the remaining 10% a custom uBlock rule will do the job, which is a bit annoying.
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.
- Java vs Scala - The JVM Battle...
- Elasticsearch vs SOLR within AWS...
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.
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.
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.
The only reason any of this makes any money is because there is money to be made in pretending it's 1995.
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.
> It also have remarkably little user interaction with its content.
Who is Kalkis Research? How am I supposed to take them seriously?