How Google will spend $1M on the internet for you

This seems like someone set out to be outraged and succeeded. Is it surprising that, if you put no limits on where Google places ads, some of the places they end up have politics you don't agree with, and others are probably low-quality ad views? If the most they have to complain about in a completely untargeted ad campaign is that #1 is a dying media company, #2 is an unclear category, and they disagree with the politics of numbers 5, 24, 58, and 61, I'd say they came through pretty well.

Google has problems, but this article doesn't really communicate any of them.

Apparently there was a further breakdown of the data linked to the page, but it was removed because they didn't have permission to share it:

> UPDATE: The original version of this story included references and a link to the $1 Million Google Sitelist. Through a misunderstanding on our part, we thought we had permission to share this document. We did not, so we have taken it down. We regret the error and have taken steps to revise our internal process to avoid this kind of mistake in the future.

Kinda curious to see that now, if it's archived anywhere.

Wouldn't "anonymous" include display ads run inside of mobile apps as they don't have an actual HTTP URL?

Hence why it could be such a large percentage?

And we know the prevalence of large ad exchanges (e.g. Xandr/AppNexus, etc), but the document doesn't list any references to those.

Why would this be important? Because ad exchanges sometimes also cloak the site and instead provide their bidding domain.

This really seems to be an ad for a new entrant into brand safety, which is an already established market[1][2][3].

But written in a way to capitalize on outrage and make it seem like they are novel in their approach?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_safety

2: https://www.oracle.com/cx/advertising/brand-safety/what-is-b...

3: https://advertising.amazon.com/library/guides/brand-safety

Very confusing title if you don't know it's about ads.

If a lot of other people are using blocklists to block foxnews.com and friends, your campaign that doesn’t block them will intuitively consume a larger share since there are fewer people bidding there. I fail to see how this site list could be representative.

Edit: Oh, I didn’t notice this is content marketing for “Check My Ads”. No wonder it’s written in this inflammatory style.

More information on the exact ad campaign run would make it easier to understand all this. Who where they targeting? What was the max cost per impression? You might not like Yahoo! or Foxnews but surely if your ad campaign is such that Google thinks your target audience can be found there, they should show your ad there?

Yahoo as top result - Yahoo is the largest site that you can place just regular Google ads on by traffic[1]. The larger sites either require you to work with them (Facebook, Instagram), have custom ads setup (Google Search), mainly do video ads (YouTube) or don't have ads (Wikipedia).

Fox News - Anecdotally, conservatives share fox links much more than other people share e.g. CNN links. It would not surprise me if Fox did have much higher traffic than other news sources combined. Especially if a lot of other advertisers are using blocklists to avoid them, then having no blocklists would get you more of that traffic too.

Really the only bit that's surprising here is the large "Anonymous" traffic. My experience here is from a Google competitor and at least when I was there we certainly did not have the market influence to get away without disclosing what sites we were running on (and it seems futile anyway as advertisers tend to use brand safety and other vendors to make sure that the sites they're running on are the same as the adtech companies tell them)

[1] https://www.expireddomains.net/alexa-top-websites/

Google should stop being so opaque, and only advertise with companies with high social credit scores, sorry I mean ESG scores.

I don't care if somebody is on the political left or right or whatever, I can find common ground and have respect for just about anybody. But this article is garbage: half of this article is just a divisive rant from a really butthurt leftist perspective about ads daring to appear on right leaning sites that they're targeting for destruction by literally running a fundraising campaign to "defund". This article is cloaked anti-free-speech political advocacy masquerading as something else.

This has been going on for a decade. This is basically a form of economic terrorism wherein left-wing activists use an easily influenceable platform like Google [employees], mere market makers, to prevent ad dollars from flowing to viewpoints they dislike. They basically want companies like Ford to involuntarily be denied access to their. . . you know. . . customers.

Sorry, "CheckMyAds.org," lots of Ford truck buyers are conservatives. That's normal. You're harming Ford, harming consumers, increasingly harming Google itself, and also increasingly not harming the viewpoints you are seeking to harm. Best to give up this particularly Orwellian tactic.

Money talks. Google is not going to change. They are a public corporation whose ultimate motive is profit. Stop giving money to those corporations whose business model you disagree with. The question for the marketer is: Can you still be successful without Google Ads? If the answer is no, then you have already lost as you feel you are bound, and you are because you choose to be.

I say re-invent the marketing wheel. Grassroots, guerrilla-style advertising. What is that? I don't know, you're the marketer.

> Fox News is followed by Breitbart, sitting at #24 on the sitelist. ZeroHedge is at #58. Drudge Report clocks in at #61. That puts the most toxic disinformation outlets in the top 1% of Google’s kingdom.

Disinformation apparently now means information you disagree with.

The author is publishing sites on the list that are right-leaning publications. There are many numbers on the list they seem to be skipping (how many of these may be more left or far left sites?). I don't get the purpose of it, besides saying that, I'm lefty and I dislike everybody on the right and can't even have an honest conversation with them.