Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee" | Hacker News Reader

Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

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190 pointsdlg95 comments

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing.

Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number.

Now the report makes the usual claims – ads run on shady sites, ads viewed by bots, ads muted or obscured, ads unskippable and against policy etc. When you read through and try to find actual numbers for the severity of these issues, they just skip over it with weasel words. Just read their opening statement:

> However, this research report finds that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only.

"significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage. Unless someone can conclusively find that, no one is going to take them seriously.

Yeah they really want to sell this as a bombshell but don't provide enough specifics or quantified data to do anything but say "well yeah ... and?"

I'm trying to find them motivations behind this thing.

> I'm trying to find them motivations behind this thing.

They aren't exactly shy about their motivations. The site says their mission is:

> "holding the surveillance adtech industry accountable for abuses against advertisers and consumers, and spearheading the development of a transparent, efficient and privacy-focused digital advertising marketplace. "

Google is the #1 game in town (arguably the only game) so they need to convince advertisers that Google's ads are not serving their interests so that they'll be receptive to an alternative. It's entirely possible that they are correct and that Google is actually screwing over advertisers, I have no idea, but I suspect that it'd be more persuasive to demonstrate that their new ad platform actually serves advertisers better in real world scenarios than to just complain about whatever crap google is pulling.

> Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number

How about actively keeping that at 0%?

Relevant: Bits About Money, The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

It's not an opinion piece or a study, it's a pretty straightforward application of the law of diminishing returns. It doesn't matter if you're talking about fraud or uptime or test scores, the cost of a 100% success rate is almost never worth the extra effort it takes to get there.

The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.

Patio11's soundbite as often shared puts the cart before the horse.

He says that the "optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" as if allowing some fraud is necessary for society to function. But what he actually means is that since not all fraud is prosecuted and prevented, allowing some fraud is just the price we pay for actually getting things done.

Take the analogy of food processing. It is accepted that some small percentage of ground coffee will be insect or rodent remains and their feces. It's not like making ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

I read Patio11's soundbite to mean that ground coffee requires animal remains and feces.

You keep calling it a soundbite—did you actually read the article, or just the title? It doesn't sound like you actually disagree with him.

> The law of diminishing returns is not natural law - it is just an observation of something that happens in practice but not always. E.g., people often choose to spend time and treasure treating an incurable cancer or send the Coast Guard to search for five people in a submersible.

Most of the time we choose to value human life at approximately infinity (especially our own lives!). When one side of the equation is near-infinite, it makes sense to keep going long after the curve has begun to flatten, but that doesn't prove that returns don't diminish, just that the value of the goal is extremely high.

Diminishing returns isn't a natural law in its own right, but it's the direct result of natural laws. It has its parallels in half lives, in the inverse square law, and in basic probability theory. While the probability of something is high, it's easy to find and eliminate because random chance is on your side. When it becomes lower, random chance starts to work against you.

> don’t disagree with him

You should (re)read my comparison of Patio11’s framing of our acceptance some amount of fraud with our acceptance of some amount of animal remains in coffee. It couldn’t be more obvious that I don’t agree with his framing.

Also, Patio11 himself says this quote ended up on the cutting room floor and treats it as a catchy sound bite in his article. Which is to say I did read the article and not just the headline…

Do you think the tradeoffs discussed in that article are unproven?

The tradeoffs are not unproven but the soundbite suggests that the tradeoffs are a necessary precondition. That's the crux of my issue with the soundbite.

So the tradeoffs are proven, but not necessary?

The trade offs happen but they aren’t the reason to say “the optimal amount of fraud is non zero”.

The correct framing is “since we accept some fraud, the optimal amount of fraud must be non-zero”.

As written, it sounds like society can only function if there is some amount of fraud.

I gave this analogy to a sibling comment of yours. Maybe it will help clarify my point. We accept some adulteration (let’s say it is 2% for conversation sake) in coffee. That’s not the same as “the optimal purity of coffee is 98%”. The optimal purity of coffee is 100% but since we can’t guarantee that some not-coffee stuff has mixed in with coffee, we live with 98%.

This is somewhat pedantic. With this logic, you could say that the purpose of a car is to get somewhere, and therefore the optimal speed is c.

But that would be a completely useless thing to say, because we can’t get your Camry to c. There is a whole system of tradeoffs that we all know exists.

Google could easily lower ”bad things” to 0 by shutting down tomorrow. The government could easily eliminate racism by nuking everyone. None of those are interesting or intellectually stimulating discussions.

“Optimal” is different than “perfect”. Everyone else here is talking about it from a system view.

How is it pedantic? The framing is fully wrong.

We can't eliminate murders but do we say the optimal amount of murders is non-zero? Instead, the right framing is "we live with some numbers of murders in aggregate because eliminating all murders is impossible". It's not like we need some number of murders for society to survive.

The use of the word optimal implies some murders (or fraud) is necessary for society (or financial transactions).

The title doesn’t generalize to “the optimal illegal ad spend at sanctioned websites and countries is non-zero”.

They’re running EU ads on household-name Russian government propaganda sites in the middle of a war. Manual curation of a block list should’ve caught that!

Is there a block list of every Russian propaganda site in existence? Who maintains such a list? Or should Google have to manually review every website every day to check if it is part of that set?

They're some of the biggest ones, and easily discernable by the most cursory glances. Are you trying to say that their efforts will catch more hidden ones but not the obvious ones? If they can't even get the easy ones, why do you think they get any of them?

> How about actively keeping that at 0%?

Practically impossible. A sufficiently well-developed bot is indistinguishable from the least technically-savvy legitimate users that clicked on an ad. Unless you have a novel way of filtering out the 2 from each other, the costs for performing such filtrations compound linearly at best & exponentially at worst.

It should still be their goal, instead of some arbitrary percentage. Or I suppose they could offer everyone a blanket discount for the fraud percentage.

It is obvious to me that third-party sites are motivated to employ every trick to increase ad views. Google cannot show ads to bots, because it will be a fraud, but a third-party site can because they are in a different country and you won't hold them responsible anyway.

I’ve never run video ads on Google, but I have run a lot of search ads, and if the 3rd party sites where they show the videos are anything like the “search partners” network, you’re correct, the sites are total trash.

Several years ago I looked through our referrers and immediately disabled search partners for all of our ads when I saw the actual sites.

Many were just clones of the Google search results UI but with ads indistinguishable from search results. Their play is to buy ads on Google themselves, while showing partner network ads on their own confusing “search results” page. They arbitrage traffic by buying ads on cheaper keywords and then getting visitors to click a more expensive ad they serve by being in the partner network.

From what I saw, I can only imagine the vast majority of human clicks through these pages are totally unintentional or confused.

At the same time, Google is the only entity that could provide the numbers you want to see.

Who else could get actual numbers of scams they run vs legit ads ? There's no other entity that sees every single of the ads they serve, so we'd need a trustworthy insider leak to meet your standard.

There is a concept from polling called a "random sample" which would apply here. If you take 10,000 clicks and sort them into legitimate and illegitimate, as long as you were able to rule out any way that your sample would be significantly more or less fraudulent than the whole pool, you would understand (roughly) the ratio in the greater pool.

It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels.

>There is a concept from polling called a "random sample"... It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels.

And maybe the edge of the pool closest to the person taking the sample is the deep end where mostly adults swim, but if they walked a bit further and took the sample from the shallow side with the babies and toddlers they'd find out the water is actually 50% piss with more than trace amounts of feces mixed in as well.

Strawman. Parent was talking about [(Cl^(-1))]

If you care about excrement content, that should be another study.

Bottom line: Representative sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

I think the point was that you need to ensure a representative sample and that requires an idea of the scale of the fraud taking place to be able to measure its impacts. I have no idea if that's possible without insider data or not, but I suspect that was the point of the argument, and not which substance was being tested for in the imaginary body of water being used as an example.

Yes, I am-- very-- well aware of what a representative sample means, and made my comment specifically with that knowledge in mind when I responded.

This would be a good measure for your own site, and you could get back to Google to say your results are garbage.

But you would have nothing to retort if they tell you you're an outlier, or your specific niche has bad actors that skew the results and they'll look into banning one or two of them (and come back to us again when they get replaced, we'll again clear a few token users)

I’m unfamiliar with how Google Video Partners works, but how could anyone go about randomly sampling the sites their ads are running on? According to the article Google won’t tell you where your ads are running. And just finding shady video websites is also not an unbiased method.

Also just to be clear, clicks are not likely to be randomly distributed between legitimate and spam sites. If advertisers are paying for plays, they need to be able to see that information as well.

If I was spending money on video ads now I would be somewhere between cancelling my ad spend and calling a lawyer.

> "significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage

I’m a bit confused. The Adalytics report definitely defines numbers and percentages of the samples they looked at. Obviously only Google will have the authoritative final numbers, but they are also the ones most incentivized to keep them as opaque as possible. I admit I’m not very familiar with the ad business, and know that a fraud is rampant, but there is a difference between a rampant 5-10% fraud to 50–60%. The first few paragraph list a lot of percentages from that report

Original report: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...

Every thing you said sums up to: "Just trust Google".

All available credible evidence says they’re sending money to sanctioned entities and intentionally defrauding their customers. The fraud rate is somewhere between 50-90% of revenue, and adds up to billions.

The article cites specific examples of fraudulent spend, with screenshots, etc., on comically easy to detect domain names, including ones that other parts of Google block.

Also, they’ve progressively taken action to expand the percentage of advertisers they can defraud, and also to ensure the fraud is difficult to detect.

On top of all that, it is only possible due to monopolistic bundling of YouTube and the ad networks, in a scheme that could be a textbook example from “anti-trust litigation 101”.

Why not post this "credible evidence" then?

> The fraud rate is somewhere between 50-90% of revenue, and adds up to billions.

This is the only part that is relevant, and if you have a source for this then do share it.

It's in the original report, which several other people have already linked to:

https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...

There's a detailed methodology section. I haven't verified their results, but they report finding things like muted, autoplaying ads even on big-name sites like the New York Times.

A few key quotes:

"For one major infrastructure brand approximately 73% of their TrueView skippable in-stream budget was spent on Google Video Partner sites or apps whose ad delivery does not appear to be consistent with the TrueView or in-stream requirements."

"A major consumer goods brand had 75% of their TrueView budget delivered against Google Video Partner (GVP) sites or apps. 56% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 19% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against ineligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps[...]"

"A Fortune 500 brand had approximately 57% of their total TrueView in-stream ad budget served on GVP sites and apps. 35% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 8% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against in-eligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps."

I'm no marketing expert, but 43-73% of one's ad budget basically being thrown away seems like not great results.

Of COURSE google says "yeah tottally below %".

I'm reminded of that quote "a man doesn't understand when his pay depends on him not understanding". Do you by any chance work in the advertising industry? (To be absolutely clear, if you work for google the answer to that question is yes)

Edit: not just a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely waiting for an answer to this.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or sites just plain not loading, because you forgot you're still connected to a VPN, or using Apples private relay.

I occasionally like to look at the DailyMail but when it complains and blocks me for using an adblocker I just nope out. I've seen what that site looks like without serious adblocking and I'm astounded any sane person could ever endure that experience. It's bad enough with adblocking.

The only places I really visit now are small forums, a few Reddits, HN obviously and not much else.

As an example of just how broken and manipulative it all is. Open Google. Search for apples.

It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds). Wow. Big DATA! Click to page 10. Click to page 11. That's the last page for me now and it now says at the top: Page 11 of about 103 results (0.70 seconds).

That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Oh and forget trying to manipulate the query string like the good old days, it's now just a big old long list of encrypted garbage.

> It tells me it found 8,540,000,000 results (0.38 seconds).

Lol, that takes me back to CS101 in college circa 2004. Our professor Loved Google at the time. When he was introducing binary search he opened google and did a search a showed us that top number. Then said “This is the POWER of binary search!!” Ngl, I was impressed at the time. It’s a funny memory.

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet.

Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

> It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general

My search experience has been consistently the opposite. Google rejects more defined queries. The more terms you add to your queries, the more likely it’s that it’ll just ignore them.

This is a recent trend btw. It wasn’t that use 4 or 5 years ago, but it’s certainly increasingly random the more terms I add to my search query.

One of my biggest pet peeves with ChatGPT is how conversational I have to make my query to be. I can’t just type terms and let it figure them out. But that’s to be expected I guess. Google search seems to struggle with both atm. I have no doubt they are aware and working on it, but it just sucks atm

I've observed the same. And the last few results might as well be random - no clear relationship to my search.

I'm sorry, I don't like to argue on HN, but this is a really silly thing to say.

For instance, search for: "how voltage affects metal in a frozen liquids"

About 15,100,000 results (0.41 seconds), but you can't get past page 10. Page 10 of about 92 results (0.44 seconds)

And on page 10 is a result with this as it's description:

"lyrics to let it go. wolf pup for sale. the taste of chicago 2015 hours. crash landing auto water. prefect des yvelines france. 90s music hits playlist."

Sorry, but it's broken. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it didn't used to work like this.

The amount of results is probably made up at this point.

You got 11 pages of apples - you did well ;)

I'm told I got 8,760,000,000 "results" but only get to see 1 page of 45 links (some being ads). The "more" page shows only 8 recipes, another "more" another 8 recipes, then my only choice is "less"!

Of 9 billion results, I can see only 60.

Google is broken. I thought it would happen, but I did think they would last longer than this.

Google is a 1.5 trillion dollar advertising company. There simply isn't enough content in the world to monetize to keep Google growing YoY. All companies reach this point. Some glide to a natural equilibrium point (McDonalds, Subway), some cook the books and implode spectacularly (Enron), some oversteer in the other direction and fall down in chunky movements (Meta).

Yeah, Google's only hope is basically pouring money into AI in the hopes that they'll come up with another Google. Can't say it seems likely.

Or, crazy idea, they can accept they have absolute boatloads of money and are making tons more, and that this is enough.

Can't do that!! Must Have Growth ... Must Have Growth.

Google has done the exact same thing with Google Search Partners for 15+ years. They never disclose who these search partners are, but are opted-in by default. Their performance is always around 5-10% of Google Search-- because they are random spam-search-type sites whose sole purpose is to serve ads.

Oh no the people pumping this fetid garbage at me are being ripped off? Be still my beating heart.

You're also paying for it, indirectly.

i pay for the effects of questionable ad platform practices far more directly anytime i shop online. Amazon's "sponsored" product listings which forces sellers to compete away all their margins -- but not in the historic "competition leads to lower prices" but "competition leads to a greater take for Amazon" sense -- and makes the actual products i'm looking for arbitrarily harder to find.

the fact that the in your face malpractices are so foregranted that people reach for indirection or edge cases when throwing shade at the ad industry just highlights how one-sided the battle's become.

The reason I dislike whataboutism is that it's so easily dismissed: I think we should regulate both bad practices! Both companies are a blight on our society and we should enforce our existing laws to deal with them.

However I do feel Google's cost is more universally applicable. Tons of product types aren't commonly procured via Amazon: All business types, whether products or services, end up paying the Google tax.

i didn't mean to be what-about-ist. from my perspective there's a huge, glaring, impossible thing to miss right in front of us, and you reached specifically to the indirect issue. from my perspective, that's you being what-about-ist (ignoring the blatant bad thing in favor of the more distant bad thing).

anyway, i don't disagree with the rest. just feel that being called out for whataboutism here is a bit unfair.

Don't most advertisers invest in their own methods to tell if the ads they are buying are giving them value or not? I imagine that advertisers should have a pretty good idea of the quality of what they are buying.

Thats correct, in my previous company, we had a full internal infrastructure that provides daily or hourly perforamnce of advertisements that hits all major social media APIs.

Did prev company then compare with performance claimed by google, facebook, etc?

I work in adtech and yeah if there is a discrepancy the advertiser will 100% contact their account manager about it. Same goes for the supply side, publishers maintain what they expect to be paid and will raise any discrepancies as well.

and does account manager help sometimes, or just retrieve standard template response?

Usually it is just a misunderstanding of the metrics, but if there is an issue they will always open a ticket with the engineering teams. They also expect some level of discrepancy since the volume of data is so large.

Sure, if you're a medium-large company with a whole marketing department. But Google has a massive long tail of small businesses who have no chance of doing that kind of analysis.

My uncle ran a small business out of his garage where he got all his customers from advertising. Pretty sure he kept track of his return on each campaign and would only run them if they were profitable to him.

exactly how are the buyers supposed to do that? they have no access to any kind of logs from Googs' servers. it's a perfect setup for Googs. there is no trust but verify. at least with the old school systems of buying radio/tv ads, you can get each market to provide you with an air check showing exactly when/where the ad ran. with print, you could just get a copy of the printed thing. when advertisers were sitting around wondering how they could do less for more, Googs says, hold my beer

No. There's a century-old quote for it: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

I believe the context for that quote is that it was referencing TV ads, which makes sense. How can a TV advertiser know who is watching?

Online ads were supposed to fix this problem.

That quote's from around 1900 but your point stands for print. Nielsen actually got really good numbers for TV using statistics, self-filled form sheets and crisp one-dollar bills.

Ad attribution is extremely difficult across any ad medium, especially while respecting user privacy.

You may see an online ad two weeks ago and buy the product today, how do you attribute that?

You use promotional codes for attribution, then you have complete knowledge. So it's extremely easy, and a solved problem. No need for analytics, no need to infringe on privacy.

If you can figure out the attribution, I'd say you've infringed on privacy.

You know what the buyer was looking at

That's not an infringement of privacy in any way. Likewise then you know what the buyer purchased, since you sold it to her.

And nobody is forced to use a discount code.

I watch a youtube video and the youtuber shills me some product along with a promo code. A week later I decide to buy the product, but I don't remember what video had the ad or what the promo code was so I just don't bother with it. How are you going to attribute this sale to the youtuber?

In those cases you can't attribute, but that's okay. With normal ads you have zero certainty of attribution.

The original source article seems to be https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-truev...

I feel like this is kind of an open secret and the analytics about an ad that google or facebook give to advertisers must be taken with a grain of salt.

That is why every serious advertiser runs their own analytics about how many people visited their site from the ad, return per ad spend etc.

Of course this is harder to do on broader, brand awareness campaigns but can still be tracked to an extent.

> But Adalytics’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by Check My Ads, tells a different story.

Take it with a grain of salt

This story is complex. If there was an obvious way for CMOs at major brands to distill this issue, such as a metric, they would do it. But instead, if they are brand advertising, they want a CPM that "looks right," and Google delivers that to them with garbage inventory. If they want pure return-on-advertising-spend, Google will show to people it knows will impulse buy, but the ads will be insanely expensive. You can't just arbitrage this as an ad buyer. Anyway, the agencies and media buyers in between the CMO and Google are aligned with Google, because they are paid a budget premium, so it's really their fault that they do not care about fraud.

My disclosure is: I make a purely interactive ad product that only appears in first-party inventory like in social media feeds. In my opinion this is a non-issue if you... Make ads people like.

Here's an example of a highly successful interactive ad creative: https://appmana.com/watch/virtualtestdrive - per 1 million visits, the average engagement time was 65s. A typical video ad has a median of 0s of watch time, and 2.1s on average (hence 5s YouTube ads).

There's nothing new here. Even John Oliver will talk about ads people like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kfx2fANELo.

At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

> At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

There used to be great ads. Campaigns on TV and print media that people would talk about. That just doesn't happen online, and every single ad to me is, as you say, noise.

I see a lot of talk about the current mcdonald's campaign. The game boy game got a ton of attention on HN.

I think HN is one of the least-informed places about ads/marketing. The vast majority of commenters here are reactionary and refuse to understand how things work. They also believe they’re completely immune to marketing, while commenting on a forum dedicated to the startup funnel.

Super cool interactive ad BTW!

As I understand, the problem here is that Google wants to run your ads on third-party sites (to earn more), but you don't want to run ads there because third-party sites employ every trick possible to generate impressions even if real user never sees the ads.

If you care about money spent, you should calculate ROI for each third-party site and filter out those which give low returns. And not expect that Google will do that for you.

I would be surprised if there wasn’t some SAAS offering that did this for you.

There's a whole cottage industry of ad quality/anti-fraud filtering tools. Some better than others.

I briefly worked at a company that monetized videos with advertisements. The company would basically bundle many sites and get them video ads that the small sites wouldn’t otherwise get.

The company used GVP to provide ads to the site owners. Many of the sites were straight up serving pirated content monetized directly with gvp.

The way this was “allowed” was that the company would receive a DMCA request for the pirated content and we’d have to take it down… within 5 days. So we would wait 5 days and take it down.

In that delta, everyone made money. For the 5 days everyone made enough to stay in business and still “comply with the law”. Most of the company’s operating capital was sourced through this takedown period. 100’s of thousands a month.

It actually made the content more valuable because it introduced scarcity. The content was mostly Indian cricket matches and the only way to watch them online was pirated in this manner.

So justify it however you want, gvp and google ads in general are totally trash. Oh and we had frequent issues with advertising metrics being wrong between 5-25%. When I inquired… that’s just how they do it. It’s an “estimate.

Well, no one can complain that the right wing is being censored:

    RussiaToday.com
    Pravda.ru  
    WND.com  
    Zerohedge.com  
    Breitbart.com  
    Newsmax.com  
    Whatfinger.com  
    TheBlaze.com  
    TheFederalist.com
    Hannity.com

Half of those guys were kicked off Fox News.

At least one of the authors of this article is a political activist with an axe to grind.

The original report is more informative and worth the read.

Google is built on a super shaky basis? I think every serious thinking person on the internet has always known deep down that ads have been massively overhyped

Big brands don't care. They have massive budgets that they need to spend and are happy to spend them or else they get cut.

Unless you're selling gold bars or boats, nobody want's to overpay to run next to Breitbart.

I've personally seen my video ads running muted on partner sites.

It kind of makes the analytics useless because there's most more inconsistency in the medium where the ads are displayed (eg, not YouTube) so you never know if fluctuations actually mean anything.

The way I see it..

1. Internet ads were supposed to solve the “who’s watching” problem. By letting advertisers target their audiences and display ads on vetted sites.

2. *but* Advertising companies also offer stuff (either browsers or product features) that are on the “bleeding edge” when it comes to protect their users privacy.

3. Marketing departments anywhere from big to small sized companies know and/or deal (kinda..) with advertising fraud cuz they want to “show work”/“good quarterly results”..

4. Most of the users, just want to freely access content in order to trick their minds into feeling amused when in reality their just bored

5. Only a small fraction of the remaining users (from 4.) are capable of understand and deal with all this..

So.. The Internet is either doomed if this continues, or in the process of becoming an even bigger trash can if “they” get way with this :/

Anyone here up to starting Internet 2.0?! :)

The real goal of this post is clear about half way down the page, de-funding disinformation from right-wing sources. My guess is that the group of website that they call out as problematic are actually great for getting ad viewers (older, non-tech savvy, gullible) that don't click skip. I would be less suspicious that this was a submarine article if the sites called out were roughly balanced left-right (by US standards, which are a bit different ;-).

Yeah it's wild that Google is trying to help disinformation outlets get around Check My Ads but I guess they need the money.

Almost the entirety of Google's business is outright grift. From selling malicious ads, to forcing people to pay to stay on top of search for their own brand name, to tricks like this where ads are dishonestly sold or Google uses its position on both sides of the market to artificially boost prices, nothing about this company is or should be considered legitimate.

They simply operate as a taxation on businesses for junk marketing that, at best, treads water with organic results. And that filters down to every price we pay as consumers.

When you read stories like this, remember that you are paying more for everything so Google can do this trash.

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