Started with fanfare, Verizon's Oath never stood a chance, ad execs say | Hacker News Reader

Started with fanfare, Verizon's Oath never stood a chance, ad execs say

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29 pointsilamont12 comments

Oaths GDPR panel is one of the worst out there. Seriously, try and set your preferences.

You visit the site, it says it's tracking you and personalising adverts. No thanks. Click the button to change it. Get presented with a page asking you to visit somewhere else to change it. Ok. Click the link, get presented with a huge privacy policy and a load of not very useful sidebar links. Click around, no button to say "go away stop tracking me". And if you try and "find out how our partners use your data", good luck, all the links are 404's or behind login boxes.

Good riddance.

I find it all right actually, compared to the hot garbage that is yourchoicesonline. Once you've found the page with all the toggles at least you can opt out from everything in one place.

Both have the problem of needing you to go off-site with lots of redirects and having to allow js from tons of domains though.

The GDPR says it should be as easy to say no as it is to say yes. So if there's an "accept" button, there should be a "reject" button. No maze, no panels or toggles. No opt-out by default, either. The default is reject, so even if there were toggles, they should all be off by default.

Holy cow is that thing terrible. It is a maze of dead ends with really slow paths between them. Zero chance that it wasn't deliberately designed that way.

I have to say that Osth's GDPR cookie stuff is some of the worst I’ve come across. I usually back out these days.

ex-Yahoo here. I left before the Verizon acquisition completed. I still have a bunch of friends who chat about these things. Yahoo never really had many home grown core products except yahoo.com, finance, sports & news. All other Yahoo properties were through acquisitions and Yahoo did a fairly poor job of integrating them. I believe only a handful of old acquisitions were properly integrated. Regardless there was massive overlap in tech that we had and the subsequent acquisitions under Marissa. Most acquisitions barring a couple had poor tech and business numbers and we were surprised at their huge evaluations. Coupled with massive cultural differences and turf wars, things were not going anywhere. I believe this situation exacerbated when Verizon acquired Yahoo and tried merging AOL with it leading to further overlap. It is fun to see how management thought they could beat Google, FB and Amazon with this strategy. The funnier (possibly sadder) thing was Yahoo always had more data on users than all of the acquisitions put together and then some thanks to Mail, Finance, Sports, News and Frontpage. We did not need their tech or their people or their customers. If only management would've gotten their shit together we probably would've been a decent player in the market. However, the leadership did not think Yahoo's tech was capable and the only solution was to acquire tech and talent. They were mistaken. Management was always chasing after the market leaders and never really wanted to differentiate Yahoo for instance we never talked about having privacy focused premium experiences for our users or ad-tech that preserves privacy at the same time helps advertisers reach the correct audience. This would've given users a reason to use Yahoo products and pay for them. Management never focused on building quality products. Barring Finance and Sports all other sites had issues with data quality. Yahoo News was wrecked. It used to be the source of trusted (aka non-fake news). Management never valued it. Imagine if they would've grown it and kept the brand reputation. Today, Facebook, Google are in hot water. Yahoo would've been a hero. Advertisers would've flocked to advertise on Yahoo because users trusted them and they had integrity (advertisers never want to be associated with shitty, bad content. It rubs off the wrong way on their brand identity and product reputation). All lost opportunities. Sigh.

It just seemed so obviously foolish to buy these overpriced and shrinking giant properties that Verizon gets one after another, Yahoo was perfect for them. My outside view is the leaders of that company succeeded by just throwing money at the phone and networking infrastructure against their competitors, and they can't rescue dying media properties with money.

I usually close the tab when I run in a website that "is now part of Oath". The consent dialog just sucks.

reading about all those different ad tech platforms they have been supposedly working hard to integrate into the one to rule them all, i could only see an image of mid&top-manager paradise...

In other news, Oath is re-branding as Four Letter Word /s

For anyone who didn't know Brightroll was rolled into Oath... which is amazing considering they are saying "it's worth virtually nothing".

Fanfare? Hardly.

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