There’s much debate over just what “native advertising” means. Talk to enough publishers, however, you’ll find agreement on one thing: it isn’t banner ads.
15 Alarming Stats About Banner Ads article tells the story of current state of banner ads. The banner ad is now 18 years old. It has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with online advertising: it stands out as an intruder on webpages; and it is mostly ignored by readers.
Here are some facts picked from 15 Alarming Stats About Banner Ads article:
1. Over 5.3 trillion display ads were served to U.S. users last year. (ComScore)
4. Click-through rates are .1 percent. (DoubleClick)
5. The 468 x 60 banner has a .04 percent click rate. (DoubleClick)
6. An estimated 31 percent of ad impressions can’t be viewed by users. (Comscore)
8. 8 percent of Internet users account for 85 percent of clicks. (ComScore)
9. Up to 50 percent of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental. (GoldSpot Media)
10. Mobile CPMs are 75 cents. (Kleiner Perkins)
And yet banner continues to be a bulwark of the online advertising system. Many publishers would like to change that.
Native advertising is hot right now, even if nobody seems to know exactly what it is. Native advertising appears to mean different things to different people.
One definition: “a form of media that’s built into the actual visual design and where the ads are part of the content.” This Infographic Explains What Native Advertising Is and Summary of Native Advertising and Native Monetization 2011 – 2013 articles give a more detailed view.
You could summarize: Native advertising is the politically correct term for advertorial. Or rather, it’s an upgrade, the digital version of an old practice dating back to the era of typewriters and lead printing presses.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Marketing Land:
Ad blocking war heats up as blockers top the App Store, some publishers fight back by hiding content from people using blockers
Round 2: Peace Ad Blocker Pulled & CNET Fights Back
As concerns for and by publishers rise about ad blocking, the most popular new one for iOS bows out.
http://marketingland.com/peace-ad-blocker-pulled-143270
The revolution in ad blocking that was ushered in with iOS9 has seen its first pushback. The Peace ad blocker that topped the Apple App Store charts has been pulled, while CNET introduced messages blocking the blockers.
Concerns For Publishers, Including Independents
On the other side of that war have been any number of publishers and other voices raising concerns that ad blocking is robbing publications of revenue they need and that it especially hits hard at small independent ones.
Indeed, among those small publishers are places like Daring Fireball, the popular blog of John Gruber. He expressed dissatisfaction that Peace stripped ads off his site that were provided by The Deck.
Publishers Fight Back
Meanwhile, The Loop noted that CNET was now targeting messages to those using ad blockers, telling them to disable the blockers to view content. The Washington Post did something similar earlier this month, before iOS9 was even released (that move had an impact on people using ad blockers with desktop browsers).
“It’s going to be a bloody war,” wrote Dave Mark, of The Loop.
Indeed. Ad blockers have been largely ignored until now because they’ve generally been seen as not worth the effort for most publishers to challenge. But when Apple made them so much easier to enable for mobile browsing, where the growth area has been, alarms got sounded. Seeing ad blockers then actually rise to be among the top paid for apps has taken that to red alert.
By the way, I’m actually seeing ads on CNET — and from Google’s ad network — despite using multiple blockers. That suggests to me that some scripts might have already changed to get around the blockers.
Battle Likely To Continue
At some point, there’s likely to be a legal tussle, one that might involve both makers of such apps and Apple itself. That’ll be messy.
People have real concerns that too much tracking is going on, and they want to reassert control without being required to study ways to opt out of various ad networks — work that still won’t help with malicious networks. People also obviously would love to have a faster, cleaner browsing experience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google makes admen pay for fake YouTube views, claims research
But ad-flinger has spent more than most to stop such clicks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/24/google_charges_advertisers_fake_youtube_views_research_claim/
Google has been accused of charging advertisers for YouTube clicks against adverts even when some of those ads have not actually been viewed by a human, according to a study.
The paper – Understanding the detection of fake view fraud in Video Content Portals (PDF) – by a group of European researchers evaluated the performance of the fake view detection systems of five major online video portals.
The authors used software that runs automated tasks over the internet to view the videos.
It found that YouTube’s detection system “significantly outperforms all the others” but that it may still be susceptible to simple attacks.
“In practice, this means that views identified as fake and discounted from the public view-counter are still monetised,” it found.
According to the research, online advertising was worth $49bn (£32bn) in 2014 in the US alone.
Given its size, it is no surprise that online advertising attracts fraud. Current estimations indicate that 15-30 per cent of ad impressions are fraudulent, leading to losses in the order of billions of dollars for advertisers, said the paper.
Understanding the detection of fake view fraud in Video Content Portals
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.08874v1.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.
Hasn’t worked out that way.
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/
Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was always at the top of the pyramid.
About 10 years ago, not long after Google went public and Yahoo! was still worth upward of $50 billion, attitudes shifted. Digital search and display ads had the potential to reach TV-size audiences at a fraction of the price. “People thought it was going to change everything,” Amram says.
The euphoria escalated again around 2010 with the arrival of programmatic advertising, a typically banal industry term for what is, essentially, automation. The ideal programmatic transaction works like this: A user clicks on a website and suddenly her Internet address and browsing history are packaged and whisked off to an auction site, where software, on behalf of advertisers, scrutinizes her profile (or an anonymized version of it) and determines whether to bid to place an ad next to that article.
That’s a stunningly attractive proposition to advertisers: surgical strikes on a carpet bombing scale. Ominous for privacy advocates, sure, but nirvana for agencies, publishers, and advertisers. At long last, they’d know where every last dollar went and whether it did its job.
“We had a healthy investment in TV, local media, and digital,” he says. “We thought digital would come close and compete with television in terms of effectiveness.”
Late that year he and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.
“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,”
Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren’t human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people. According to the ANA study, which was conducted by the security firm White Ops and is titled The Bot Baseline: Fraud In Digital Advertising, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year.
One ad tracked in the study was a video spot for Chrysler that ran last year on Saveur.tv, a site based on the food and travel lifestyle magazine. Only 2 percent of the ad views registered as human
Executives at Bonnier, the publishing company behind Saveur.tv, say they screen every impression and that the White Ops study looked at 5,700 ads, a very small number. They also say there are multiple methods for detecting nonhuman traffic, and that there’s no single standard used by the industry.
Fake traffic has become a commodity. There’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it. Some companies pay for it intentionally, some accidentally, and some prefer not to ask where their traffic comes from. It’s given rise to an industry of countermeasures, which inspire counter-countermeasures. “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole,”
“I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the Internet than ad tech,” says Bob Hoffman, a veteran ad executive, industry critic, and author of the blog the Ad Contrarian. “It interferes with everything we try to do on the Web. It has cheapened and debased advertising and spawned criminal empires.” Most ridiculous of all, he adds, is that advertisers are further away than ever from solving the old which-part-of-my-budget-is-working problem. “Nobody knows the exact number,” Hoffman says, “but probably about 50 percent of what you’re spending online is being stolen from you.”
The challenge for Bonnier was building an audience. That can be done organically—by coming up with lots of content, promoting it until people start watching, persuading advertisers to buy in. Or there’s a modern shortcut: Buy traffic. Which doesn’t necessarily mean fake it. Publishers often pay to redirect human users from somewhere else on the Internet to their own sites, and companies such as Taboola and Outbrain specialize in managing this kind of traffic. Website A hires Taboola, which pays Website B to put “content from around the Web” boxes at the bottom of its pages. Viewers, enticed by headlines like “37 Things You Didn’t Know About Scarlett Johansson,” click on a box and are redirected to Website A. But redirects are also expensive. In practice, only 2 percent of people on a site click on these boxes, and Website A has to compensate Website B handsomely for giving up precious visitors.
Less ethical methods are cheaper. Pop-ups—those tiny browser windows that you ignore, click to close, or never see—are one way to inflate visitor numbers. As soon as that window appears on your computer, you’re counted as someone who’s seen the ads. An even more cost-effective technique—and as a rule of thumb, fake is always cheaper—is an ad bot, malware that surreptitiously takes over someone else’s computer and creates a virtual browser. This virtual browser, invisible to the computer’s owner, visits websites, scrolls through pages, and clicks links. No one is viewing the pages, of course; it’s just the malware. But unless the bot is detected, it’s counted as a view by traffic-measuring services. A botnet, with thousands of hijacked computers working in concert, can create a massive “audience” very quickly.
It’s also common for publishers not to tell their advertisers when they’re buying traffic, and in most cases, Bonnier didn’t.
The traffic market is unregulated, and sellers range from unimpeachable to adequate to downright sleazy; price is part of the market’s code. The cheap stuff is very easy to find. On LinkedIn there’s a forum called “Buying & Selling TRAFFIC,” where 1,000 “visitors” can be had for $1. Legit traffic is a lot more expensive. Taboola, for example, charges publishers from 20¢ to 90¢ per visitor for video content, targeted to a U.S. audience on desktops only. A publisher like Bonnier can sell a video ad for 1¢ to 1.2¢ per view in a programmatic auction, which is how the company sold most ads on its video sites. If Bonnier had gone with Taboola, it might be losing 19¢ per view or more.
“I’ve found Advertise.com selling every type of worthless traffic I am able to detect,” says Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor who researches the digital economy. “And doing so persistently, for months and indeed, years.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
Digital Content Next study: fraudulent traffic is 2.8% at member sites like Conde Nast, ESPN, Vox Media, CBS, NBCUniversal, NYT, vs. 11% on wider Web
Big Publishers’ Fraud Rate is 2.8%, Wider Web’s is 11%, Studies Say
Online media companies aim to distance themselves from ad fraud
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/big-publishers-fraud-rate-is-2-8-wider-webs-is-11-studies-say-1443412888-lMyQjAxMTI1NDI5ODkyODg1Wj
Fraudulent traffic is a problem that continues to plague the digital advertising industry, particularly with ads purchased from online advertising networks or automated ad exchanges, buyers say.
As a result, well-known media companies are eager to distance themselves from the issue, and to use the relative lack of fraud on their sites to help differentiate their ad offerings in the market.
To evaluate the quality of traffic to its members’ properties, online publishing trade group Digital Content Next commissioned ad fraud detection firm White Ops to study 32 of its members’ sites for 53 days, from June 22 through August 14. DCN participants included Conde Nast, ESPN, Vox Media, CBS Interactive, NBCUniversal, the New York Times and more.
The goal was to compare fraudulent traffic to its members’ sites with that present in the wider online ad ecosystem, which was last year examined by a separate White Ops study.
According to DCN’s study, “sophisticated bots” accounted for an average of 2.8% of traffic to display ads across its members’ properties, and 2.5% of traffic to video ads.
“It’s interesting that these guys are now trying to define ‘premium’ as a category as ‘bot-free,’” Mr. Tiffany said. “That’s the world we’re living in; it’s a selling point.”
“The results are compelling, but this is not the finish line,” he said. “The trust that [member publishers] have in their brands and what defines premium is something they earn every day.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Guynn / USA Today:
Facebook making play for TV dollars with new ad products
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/27/facebook-advertising-dollars-video-television/72948138/
Facebook is rolling out new advertising products that it says will help marketers better reach consumers on their mobile devices — and they may help Facebook make a big play for television advertising dollars.
The giant social network is targeting marketers who use video ads with a new product for buying online video ads that is similar to the way TV commercials are bought. The lure that Facebook is using: It’s a better way to reach millennials who spend far more time on their phones than watching TV.
Research firm eMarketer projects digital video advertising spend will increase 13% to nearly $15 billion by 2019. TV advertising is expected to grow 2% in the same time period to $78 billion.
“Digital video ad spending is growing rapidly, presenting new opportunities for Facebook,” eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in an email.
However, “even as digital video grows by double-digit percentages year over year, TV ad spending is still expected to increase. We are not seeing TV spending falling at the expense of digital video,” Williamson said.
Facebook’s mobile ad business is booming. eMarketer expects Facebook to generate $12.5 billion in worldwide mobile ad revenue in 2015, an increase of nearly 69% over last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AdSense fraud still too easy, says Spanish boffin
Uni prof goes public with two-year-old bug
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/29/adsense_fraud_still_too_easy_says_spanish_boffin/
A bit of code-work is all it takes to sidestep one of Google’s key AdSense protection mechanisms.
That’s the conclusion of Spanish researcher Manuel Blázquez, a PhD and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.
In a paper just published at Arxiv, he says a combination of cross-site scripting (XSS) and old-fashioned Web crawling means you can obtain “the validated links of the ads published on a website”.
For an attacker, penetrating the JavaScript that’s supposed to protect advertisers is a big thing, because it raises the spectre of being able to launch automated click campaigns on an advertisement – either to falsely boost the apparent performance of an ad network, or to attack an advertiser by getting Google to down-rate them in the AdSense system.
In response to previous click-fraud, the professor explains, Google’s worked hard to put a kind of air-gap between an advertisement and the site hosting it.
A vulnerability in Google AdSense: Automatic extraction of links to ads
http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07741
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google brings you closer to your customers in the moments that matter
http://adwords.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/Google-brings-you-closer-to-your-customers.html
Mobile has changed the game for both consumers and brands. Consumer expectations for immediacy and relevance are higher than ever, and successful brands are those that connect with people in the moments that matter most to them — the I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy moments. Google is a company built on meeting people’s needs in the moment. Through our ads innovations, we’ve brought that ability to businesses large and small.
Reach your most valuable customers with Customer Match
70% of online consumers agree that the quality, timing, and relevance of a brand’s message influences their perception of a brand.
When it comes to your most valuable customers, they expect even more from you.
Customer Match is a new product designed to help you reach your highest-value customers on Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail — when it matters most. Customer Match allows you to upload a list of email addresses, which can be matched to signed-in users on Google in a secure and privacy-safe way. From there, you can build campaigns and ads specifically designed to reach your audience. Users can control the ads they see, including Customer Match ads, by opting out of personalized ads or by muting or blocking ads from individual advertisers through Google Ads Settings.
Promote your apps with unparalleled reach
People discover new apps in many ways: online searches, recommendations while watching their favorite videos, and in-app suggestions. If your business has an app, you need a scalable way to reach the customers that are most likely to install your app — across a variety of channels.
Starting today, Universal App Campaigns will be available to all developers and advertisers as a new AdWords campaign type that helps you connect with app users across Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network (GDN). In just a few simple steps, you can promote your app with unparalleled reach across the world’s largest network and platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
YouTube announces Shopping ads, which overlay the video player, with testing this fall
YouTube Introduces Shopping Ads
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/29/youtube-shopping-ads/#.ojwuxm:NGgW
YouTube videos are going to get more shoppable, with the company announcing a new ad unit today called Shopping ads.
The Google-owned video site has been moving in this direction for the past few months, with the introduction of Cards for related content (including merchandise) and the launch of TrueView for shopping, which allows advertisers to automatically turn their Google merchant data into product cards.
“While both of these features are great for making advertiser videos more shoppable, Shopping ads bring this functionality to all videos on YouTube,” the company says.
The point is, Google really wants advertisers to promote their products on YouTube and to allow consumers to start the purchase process directly from those videos.
So if you’re watching something on YouTube, you might start seeing an info icon on the upper right corner of the video. Clicking on the icons will bring up related Cards, including any product ads, and clicking on the ads will take you to the merchant website.
That’s a different approach from the recently announced Purchases On Google, where mobile advertisers can direct consumers to Google-hosted product pages.
Google says this will run similarly to Shopping ads on Google Search, with an auction model, targeting based on context and audience
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapchat to launch sponsored selfies
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0%2F4e2f193c-6860-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html#axzz3nLzOVY00
Snapchat is preparing to launch a new advertising format that will allow brands to slip in to teenagers’ selfies, as it hunts for ways to make money from its young audience.
sell “sponsored lenses” to marketers
The animated lenses will appear alongside the regular options, launched two weeks ago
Tomi Engdahl says:
LinkedIn pays big after class action lawsuit over user emails
http://mashable.com/2015/10/03/linkedin-class-action/#Tlsix9NnPOqG
The company known for using reminder emails to get you to use its professional networking service will now have to pay a hefty sum for taking the tactic a bit too far.
In an email sent by LinkedIn on Friday, users were notified that they were eligible for a class action settlement related to email marketing. The company has agreed to pay out $13 million to users who may have been impacted by its Add Connections service.
LinkedIn’s Add Connections program allowed users to import their personal contacts into the company’s system and then have invitations to connect on LinkedIn sent out on their behalf. However, if a recipient of the invitation email didn’t accept the invitation within a certain amount of time, LinkedIn would then send two follow up emails repeating the invitation.
If you’re a big fan of LinkedIn, that’s called thorough follow-up. But others, less familiar with the service, might consider such messages to be annoying spam. What makes such an instance worse is if the recipient thinks the spammy messages are coming from you, a person they know, rather than a third party.
LinkedIn’s payout is designed to cover a broad range of email activity, from September 17, 2011 and October 31, 2014.
Although LinkedIn is making the massive payment to address legal claims around email abuse, the company itself hasn’t directly admitted to any wrongdoing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DuckDuckGo CEO: ‘It’s a myth you need to track people to make money in web search’
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/duckduckgo-ceo-its-myth-you-need-track-people-make-money-web-search-1523025
The CEO and founder of DuckDuckGo has revealed that the privacy-focused search engine is making a profit despite not tracking its users’ online activity and search history.
“DuckDuckGo is actually profitable. It is a myth you need to track people to make money in web search,” Weinberg said during the AMA session. “Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in ‘car’ and get a car ad.
“These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the internet without this search intent, and that’s why you’re tracked across the internet with these same ads.”
Privacy awareness post-Snowden
One of the key factors to DuckDuckGo’s recent growth, according to Weinberg, was the mass surveillance revelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden. Another factor cited for causing a spike in adoption rates included Google’s 2012 decision to change its privacy policy to allow tracking across all of its services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Google SVP for search: More than half of Google searches worldwide now happen on mobile, more than 100B links within apps indexed
Worldwide, More Than Half Of Google’s Searches Happen On Mobile
Google also says it has indexed 100 billion links within apps.
http://searchengineland.com/half-of-google-search-is-mobile-232994
Earlier this year, Google announced that for the first time, it was seeing more search activity on mobile than desktop. The caveat was that this was for 10 countries, including the US. Today, Google has now said this is the case worldwide.
It was last May when Google said that more searches were happening on mobile devices than desktop in the US, Japan and eight other countries that weren’t named. Today, Google’s senior vice president of search, Amit Singhal, reiterated that statement when speaking at Recode’s Code Mobile event, as reported by The Verge.
More than half of all Google searches now happen on mobile devices
A win for the web
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/8/9480779/google-search-mobile-vs-desktop-2015
Google may be waging an ongoing battle against its competitors to keep smartphone owners using the web, but recent evidence suggests it’s making progress. Google’s Amit Singhal, senior vice president of search, said today Google now sees more than half of its 100 billion monthly searches occurring on mobile devices. Singhal, who’s speaking at Recode’s Code Mobile conference in Half Moon Bay, California, defined mobile as devices with screens smaller than six inches.
“For the first time, we’re getting more searches on mobile devices than on desktop,” Singhal said. The metric is significant because Google has been facing off against Facebook and Apple in a power grab for internet browsing habits. Google bakes search, which helps generate a majority of its ad revenue, into nearly every Android handset sold around the globe, making it a backbone of the mobile ecosystem. Yet Facebook has increasingly been tailoring its mobile app, which it’s built into its own ad-supported money-making machine, as a one-stop shop for all your web needs. There’s no reason to use Google search if Facebook can surface everything you’re looking for via algorithms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet
In fact, they might halve everyone’s marketing budget
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14/adblockers_kill_off_the_internet_marketing_budget/
There’s worry out there that the spread of ad blockers will kill off the internet. Or at least, the idea that people are paid to create stuff for it but that people aren’t charged to look at it. You know, like, umm, El Reg.
This has all come up as Apple has allowed the technology in iOS9, and people started to offer the software that performs the trick. The worry’s been such that one bloke even withdrew his offering, muttering that perhaps he didn’t want to bankrupt the providers of all of his favourite reading.
However, I’m not entirely sure that that’s the right way to think about it.
The point being that Lord Lever once said: “I know that half my marketing budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” That allied with the point that ads themselves aren’t just means of persuasion. They’re information too.
A reasonable estimate is that at any one time in a big city these days there’s some one billion items on offer. And someone, somewhere, needs to be telling us what they are.
So, we know that much advertising is wasted, also that at least some of it is informative. So, in that world, what’s the effect of people blocking their ever seeing any of the ads?
So, people who don’t even get served ads by blocking the very possibility are those upon which the ads would have been wasted anyway.
Leaving the advertising to be seen by those who are looking for information: exactly the people the advertisers actually want to reach in the first place.
So it’s not entirely obvious that adblocking does lead to a particular problem with the standard business model: the readers are the product being sold to the advertisers.
Blockers are simply signalling that they’re not the ones who would be interested in, or influenced by, advertising anyway. So, everyone, as they market themselves out, saves the effort of bothering to advertise to them.
Obviously, there’s a problem if everyone does this. That means that no one at all is interested in advertising. But given that advertising does change sales numbers, that cannot actually be true.
And that doesn’t change whether you’re advertising to many or few people. Thus, if it’s worth spending, say, £10 to make the sale of a tablet, then whether that £10 is spread over 2,000 or 1,000 people doesn’t matter very much.
Because, of course, we know that half our advertising is wasted, but the people with adblockers are by their very action telling us that they were the people it was being wasted upon. Thus we still want to spend that £10 on advertising to the 1,000 who aren’t using the software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shira Orbach / IAB:
IAB launches program to address ad blocking with light, encrypted, ad-choice supported, and non-invasive ads — Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX — We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.
Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX
http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.
Twenty years ago we saw an explosion of websites, built by developers around the world, providing all forms of content. This was the beginning of an age of enlightenment, the intersection of content and technology. Many of us in the technical field felt compelled, and even empowered, to produce information as the distribution means for mass communication were no longer restricted by a high barrier to entry.
In 2000, the dark ages came when the dot-com bubble burst.
We engineered not just the technical, but also the social and economic foundation that users around the world came to lean on for access to real time information. And users came to expect this information whenever and wherever they needed it. And more often than not, for anybody with a connected device, it was free.
This was choice—powered by digital advertising—and premised on user experience.
But we messed up.
Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.
The rise of ad blocking poses a threat to the internet and could potentially drive users to an enclosed platform world dominated by a few companies. We have let the fine equilibrium of content, commerce, and technology get out of balance in the open web.
Today, the IAB Tech Lab is launching the L.E.A.N. Ads program. Supported by the Executive Committee of the IAB Tech Lab Board, IABs around the world, and hundreds of member companies, L.E.A.N. stands for Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive ads. These are principles that will help guide the next phases of advertising technical standards for the global digital advertising supply chain.
As with any other industry, standards should be created by non-profit standards-setting bodies, with many diverse voices providing input.
L.E.A.N. Ads do not replace the current advertising standards many consumers still enjoy and engage with while consuming content on our sites across all IP enabled devices. Rather, these principles will guide an alternative set of standards that provide choice for marketers, content providers, and consumers.
The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond.
That is user experience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon targets 1,114 ‘fake reviewers’ in Seattle lawsuit
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631
Amazon is taking legal action against more than 1,000 people it says have posted fake reviews on its website.
The US online retail giant has filed a lawsuit in Seattle, Washington.
It says its brand reputation is being damaged by “false, misleading and inauthentic” reviews paid for by sellers seeking to improve the appeal of their products.
It comes after Amazon sued a number of websites in April for selling fake reviews.
Amazon said it had conducted an investigation, which included purchasing fake customer reviews on Fiverr from people who promised five-star ratings and offered to allow purchasers to write reviews.
It said it had observed fake review sellers attempting to avoid detection by using multiple accounts from unique IP addresses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IAB: It’s time to tackle the web advertising elephant in the room
Oversight group says the consumer deserves better standards
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430881/iab-its-time-to-tackle-the-web-advertising-elephant-in-the-room
THE INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING BUREAU (IAB), which ought to know about these things, has said that online advertising has failed the consumer and needs a rethink.
The alarm has been sounded at a time when ad blocking is high on the news and public agendas. The sometimes controversial issue of ad blocking is a relevant topic at publishing houses large and small, and the IAB, the organisation created to concern itself with the medium and the message, is on the case.
“Through our pursuit of further automation and maximisation of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimise publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession,” the IAB said in a bold statement about its Lean Ads programme.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Comcast is in talks with TV networks and audience measurement firms to share data harnessed from set-top boxes and apps — Comcast Seeks to Harness Trove of TV Data — Cable giant is in talks with TV networks and measurement firms to license viewing data from set-top boxes, apps
Comcast Seeks to Harness Trove of TV Data
Cable giant is in talks with TV networks and measurement firms to license viewing data from set-top boxes, apps
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/comcast-seeks-to-harness-trove-of-tv-data-1445333401-lMyQjAxMTE1NTIwMDgyMjA2Wj
Comcast Corp. is sitting on a potential treasure trove of data on how Americans watch TV. Now, the cable giant is working to unlock that information in ways that it hopes could save the $70 billion U.S. television advertising market.
Comcast is seeking to harness viewing data from the set-top boxes and streaming apps used by its millions of cable-TV subscribers to create products it can license to other companies, according to people familiar with its plans. That will require organizing a vast pool of details into “dashboards” that TV networks and marketers can use to tap specific slices of data.
In recent months, Comcast rebuffed an offer from TV-ratings specialist Nielsen, which was willing to pay roughly $100 million for an exclusive license to the data, these people said, though the two companies are deep in talks about other potential partnerships.
Comcast is betting the industry, armed with the company’s data, could better compete with Web-based rivals, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., whose ad-targeting capabilities are a big draw for marketers.
TV networks also are interested in using data to evaluate their programming—to assess, for instance, whether a show with a small audience is worth keeping on the air because it has an avid group of return viewers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile
https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/searches-average-mobile-google-problem/
Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, let slip a couple of interesting statistics at the Re/Code conference – none more so than that more than half of all searches incoming to Google each month are from mobile. (That excludes tablets.)
This averages out to less than one search per smartphone per day. We’ll see why in a bit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Felix Kjellberg / PewDiePie:
Top YouTuber PewDiePie: YouTube Red exists to counter ad blocking, which can devastate smaller channels
Thoughts on YouTube Red.
http://pewdie.tumblr.com/post/132147138150/thoughts-on-youtube-red
Since YouTube recently announced their new payed service “YouTube Red”. Everyone has been up to arms about it, for mainly good reasons!
YouTube doesn’t exactly have the greatest reputation when it comes to new updates.
YouTube Red’s main selling points being: You can watch YouTube without ads, watch original shows, download videos, access to music library, etc. All for $10 a month.
So how come YouTube, an ad revenue website decided to switch to include payed services? This might seem insane, especially since YouTube comes from the ad giant Google.
Well, despite YouTube being a huge website, YouTube still isn’t profiting.
Either way, it still seems that most people aren’t sold about YouTube Red yet:
Why? Well the answer is simple, people’s main argument being: “Why would I pay $10 a month for a service that I can get for free with Adblock”?
I can also confirm with my own Google statistics that, that 40% is a correct estimate.
It’s a number that has grown a lot over the years, from roughly 15-20% when I started. And it’s not unlikely that it will keep growing.
What this means is that YouTubers lose about 40% of their ad income.
Personally, I’m ok with if you use adblock on my videos. Ads are annoying, I get it, I’m not here to complain about that.
I think what many people still don’t realize is that:
# YouTube Red exist largely as an effort to counter Adblock.
# Using Adblock doesn’t mean you’re clever and above the system.
# YouTube Red exist because using Adblock has actual consequences.
Now, there are questions remained to be answered about YouTube Red. Like: How much of YouTube Red’s $10 actually goes to it’s creators?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marty Swant / Adweek:
Facebook debuts two new ad tools for businesses to better understand and target nearby consumers — Facebook’s New Tools Let Merchants Tailor Ads for Nearby Consumers — While Facebook yesterday revealed that its advertising sales increased 45 percent year over year to $4.3 billion in the third quarter …
Facebook’s New Tools Let Merchants Tailor Ads for Nearby Consumers Can give insights for consumer groups within 150 feet By Marty Swant
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/facebooks-new-local-ad-products-target-and-track-nearby-consumers-167949
While Facebook yesterday revealed that its advertising sales increased 45 percent year over year to $4.3 billion in the third quarter, it would still like to gain a bigger share of local business marketing budgets.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant today announced it’s debuting two ad products for local businesses aimed at helping them better understand the foot traffic in their area while also allowing those with many locations to target ads for specific stores.
For starters, the company is launching a new tab in Page Insights to help businesses better understand the groups of people near their store. Looking at aggregate demographics and local trends, businesses can see—because Facebook’s mobile app users often their their location be known—when their neighborhood is busiest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook brings creepy ’Minority Report’-style ads one step closer
Zuck flogs your location to brands for a mall mithering
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/09/facebook_minority_report_ads/
Facebook will nudge the retail industry one step closer to Minority Report-style ads that know who you are, where you are, and blast you with personalized ads that only you can see.
We’re still some way from the noir movie vision, but you don’t need to boil a lobster quickly.
From Thursday, Facebook will make its users’ location and personal data history available to brands in the US, who can then decide whether to blast local foot traffic with targeted advertising. A brand will be able to tell how many local shoppers had “engaged” (that’s the jargon) with one of its advertisements on Facebook within the past 28 days.
The data will be aggregated and anonymised, unlike the 2002 Dreamworks movie adaption of Philip K Dick’s eponymous short story.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TV Networks Cutting Back On Commercials
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/11/11/1624211/tv-networks-cutting-back-on-commercials?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Cable providers aren’t the only ones feeling pressure from cord cutters. The TV networks themselves are losing viewers the same way. A lot of those viewers are going to Netflix and other streaming services, which are often ad-free, or have ad-free options. Now, in an effort to win back that audience (and hang on to the ones who are still around), networks are beginning to cut back on commercial time during their shows.
Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience’s full attention.”
Why TV Networks Are Cutting Back on Commercials
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-10/tv-networks-cut-commercial-time-as-viewers-become-numb-to-ads
Hate commercials? Good news: You may see fewer of them.
Media companies, including Time Warner Inc., 21st Century Fox Inc. and Viacom Inc., have started cutting back on commercials after years of squeezing in as many ads as possible.
The new strategy is an attempt to appeal to younger viewers, who are more accustomed to watching shows ad-free on online streaming services like Netflix Inc., and to advertisers concerned their messages are being ignored amid all the commercial clutter.
Time Warner’s truTV will cut its ad load in half for prime-time original shows starting late next year, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes said last week on an earnings call. Viacom has recently slashed commercial minutes at its networks, which include Comedy Central and MTV. Earlier this month, Fox said it will offer viewers of its shows on Hulu the option to watch a 30-second interactive ad instead of a typical 2 1/2-minute commercial break. Fox says the shorter ads, which require viewers to engage with them online, are more effective because they guarantee the audience’s full attention.
‘Training’ Consumers
“We know one of the benefits of an ecosystem like Netflix is its lack of advertising,” Howard Shimmel, chief research officer at Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting, said in an interview. “Consumers are being trained there are places they can go to avoid ads.”
By airing fewer ads, the theory goes, the remaining ones become more memorable, and thus more valuable to advertisers, letting programmers charge higher rates. Yet, by shrinking the commercials, they run the risk of leaving money on the table at a time when the industry is under growing pressure from consumers ditching pay-TV services for cheaper online alternatives.
“The customer can avoid a whole number of other ads, so we’ll charge a higher price,” Fox CEO James Murdoch said at a conference in September.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Five Bad Marketing Habits to Stop in 2016
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328225&
Do NOT keep positioning your company or product, as if it can do everything. It can’t, and you will lose the battle on Google and with your competition if you do this. Position for growth by differentiating and say NO to distractions that are not aligned to this position so you can focus and GROW in the areas where you are differentiated.
Do not invest in any new marketing activities until your website is fully functioning. It must be designed for mobile use and have a user-friendly content management system that makes uploading new content easy. Engineers like graphics and images, so use them.
Do not create any new content until you have a plan along the entire marketing and sales funnel that includes optimizing (for keywords your audience searches on), amplifying (for greater reach), and repurposing each piece (for full leverage of your investment).
Do not keep spinning your wheels on repetitive marketing tasks and missing valuable intelligence gathering that come with implementing marketing automation.
Do not invest in marketing without a clear picture of your expected ROI, timeframe, and process and tools to measure, tweak, and improve. As the saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Welcome to the Future — Dynamic Adverts
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=216&doc_id=1328250&
It may be that — in the not-so-distant future — everyone watching a TV program in the comfort of their own homes sees different advertising objects seamlessly embedded in the scenes.
Just when you thought you’d seen it all, something new comes along that makes your mind go all wobbly around the edges. And what has put me in this contemplative mood? Well…
…as a starting point, let’s take American football games as presented on television. In the not-so-distant past, all we could hope to see on the screen was the field, the players and referees, and the ball. By comparison, these days we are also presented with an imaginary yellow line superimposed on the image reflecting the targeted first down, and this is accompanied by an imaginary blue line to mark the line of scrimmage.
This is actually really clever — the way they arrange it so that these lines seem to be painted on the field and they don’t appear in front of any of the players and suchlike takes an incredible amount of technology and computing power.
Or you might access an on-demand version of the program stripped of any adverts. As you can imagine, this doesn’t exactly cheer the advertising agencies up at all.
One way around this from the advertising point of view is to move the adverts into the television show or movie itself. This form of advertising, known as product placement, can be quite subtle
The reason I’m waffling on about this here is that I’m currently visiting the UK and I’ve just seen the most amazing demonstration of next-generation advertising technology. This is similar to the yellow and blue lines being superimposed on an American football game on TV, except that it involves integrating products into TV shows and movies.
Take the examples I presented earlier — now the director can add computer-generated items into the fridge, or computer-generated posters on a wall, or computer-generated cars at the side of a street, and so forth. Why is this better than simply using real objects for product placement? Well, the thing is that you can change the objects depending on the target market.
Suppose someone is holding a soft drink can in their hands, for example. Now, the actual soft drink seen by the viewer can vary depending on the country in which the media is being presented.
I can envisage a not-too-distant future in which everyone who is watching a program on television in the comfort of their own homes sees different advertising objects seamlessly interwoven into the scene.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Facebook brings 360-degree videos to iOS, opens up format to brands with first ads from AT&T, Samsung, Corona, Walt Disney World, others — Facebook Unleashes VR-Style 360 Videos For Ads And iOS — Zuck says VR is the future and Facebook is wasting no time building it into the News Feed and starting to make money off it.
Facebook Unleashes VR-Style 360 Videos For Ads And iOS
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/vmarketing/
Zuck says VR is the future and Facebook is wasting no time building it into the News Feed and starting to make money off it. By embracing the format, Facebook can stay fresh for consumers by offering the most vivid way to connect with places you can’t go. Meanwhile, attracting organic VR videos will provide cover so it can slip VmaRketing into the feed.
Facebook brought 360 video viewing support to web and Android in September, and you can now watch these VR-style videos on iOS. Facebook is also opening up the format to advertisers, the first “immersive stories” coming from brands including AT&T, Corona, Nescafe, Ritz Crackers, Samsung and Walt Disney World.
These videos can be watched by tap-and-dragging around the screen, or for a true virtual reality experience, starting today on the Samsung Gear VR. Meanwhile, to get more people sharing 360 content to the News Feed, Facebook is working with 360 camera makers like Theta, Giroptic and IC Real Tech to add “publish to Facebook” buttons to their apps. That means there’s no need to fiddle with uploading the 360 video to your computer first.
Finally, to stoke 360 content creation, Facebook launched a microsite dedicated to providing filmmakers best practices, upload guidelines, and FAQs.
360 Video
A stunning way for content creators to share immersive stories, places, and experiences with their fans.
https://360video.fb.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
Companies Target Journalists With Ads on Facebook — Messages are targeted to people who work at specific media outlets — The next time you see an article about a company or product, consider this: it’s possible the author heard about it through a Facebook ad.
Companies Target Journalists With Ads on Facebook
Messages are targeted to people who work at specific media outlets
http://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-target-journalists-with-ads-on-facebook-1447664403
The next time you see an article about a company or product, consider this: it’s possible the author heard about it through a Facebook ad.
Marketers, public relations companies and advertising agencies are increasingly using social media to carefully place messages in front of journalists and media professionals, in the hope that doing so will “earn” them or their clients coverage, or at least keep them top-of-mind for a mention.
This concept of targeting ads to “influencers” in certain fields is not a new one, but marketers say the increasingly granular targeting tools being offered by companies such as Facebook and Twitter are allowing them to get more sophisticated with their efforts.
It’s not uncommon for companies to target tailored messages to journalists at specific outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or USA Today, experts say.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Malvertising: How the ad model makes crime pay
… and who’s liable for all the money lost?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/23/liability_chain_malvertising_advertising/
The exploitation of online advertising networks by malware-flingers is expected to cause up to $1bn in damages by the end of this year, but despite ongoing regulatory efforts, it is not clear to whom the liability for these enormous losses will fall.
The increasingly sophistication with which online advertisers profile users has allowed those exploiting ad networks to hit victims with extraordinary cost-effectiveness. The way that ad networks sell impressions targeted to browser types, that identify whether anti-virus solutions are active, and display recipients’ earnings profile, alongside the low barrier to entry for new customers, allows for criminals to reap high returns on their investments.
Delivering a presentation on the mechanics behind malvertising attacks, Malwarebytes’ senior security researcher Jérôme Segura noted how advertising networks’ mechanics were an important aspect of the return on investment for miscreants, allowing the the attack vector to expand.
In particular, it is real-time bidding (RTB) – enabling advertisers to purchase and sell advertising inventory through a programmatic and automated auction process – that provides criminals with their economic platform. With RTB, customers need only pay for the auctions which they win. This has obvious efficiency benefits for the advertisers, whose business provides much of the finance behind online businesses, however it also provides an opportune environment for threat actors to elbow their way in.
Malvertising campaigns can thus effectively target only those who will be vulnerable to the attack, which means that such attacks are “very cost-effective,” according to Malwarebytes’ CEO Marcin Kleczynski, to the degree that their “pay-per-impression rate is essentially pay-per-infection”.
According to Malwarebytes, one malvertising campaign that ran from January to February this year was able to expose 6,000 web browsers to malware for an investment of just $5. Responsibility for the damages caused through this expanding attack vector, which are expected to reach $1bn this year, remains difficult to attribute.
“Advertisers bring in money and it would be going against business sense to terminate them at their first offence,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sources: Snapchat ad campaigns now start at $100K, down from $700K a year ago
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/20/sources-snapchat-ad-campaigns-now-start-at-100k-down-from-700k-a-year-ago/
Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app favored by millennials, is becoming a more accessible advertising medium for marketers, but the cost of entry is still high.
Two sources who routinely buy ad placements on popular app platforms tell VentureBeat that the the minimum price to launch any kind of campaign at Snapchat is $100,000. That $100,000 price point is likely to be prohibitive for all but the largest national brands.
Why are brands paying? Because people view 6 billion short videos a day on Snapchat, the app has 100 million active daily users, and 63 percent of those fall into the highly coveted 18 to 34 crowd — the “millennials.” One report says brands are now spending five times more to market to millennials than to other demographics.
Lots of details are still unknown. It’s unclear exactly what the $100,000 buys on Snapchat. We do not know the full menu of ad products offered and their prices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Video malvertising campaign lasted 12 hours? Try two months
Vid crapware issue worse than you thought – researchers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/24/video_malware_advertising/
A malvertising campaign exploiting online videos to fling poison at netizens actually lasted for two months rather than the 12 hours previously reported, according to new research which suggested the previously unfavoured medium may be ripe for exploitation.
Contrary to The Media Trust’s report that a video malvertising campaign hit “some of the largest, most heavily trafficked sites for more than 12 hours”, an investigation by malvertising monitors ClarityAd discovered it had actually been ongoing for two months.
Two security experts who have analysed the vector extensively stated that the duration of the mischief suggested the industry needed to put much more effort into dealing with the new threat of video advertising malware.
To date malvertising has mostly targeted “display” advertisements, whether they be based on patch-addicted Flash or images with some nasties embedded.
The use of video advertisements has been a less exploited medium due to the relative security of the video advertising XML compared to the horror of Javascript, and the much higher cost of running a video campaign.
However video’s XML – VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) proved insufficient for advertisers, who demanded an extension to execute code in advertisements. That led to VPAID (Video Player Ad-Serving Interface Definition), a specification released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It was this which made video malvertising campaigns feasible.
Route of all evil
Businesses’ vulnerability to protecting their revenue seemingly demands the frequent obfuscation of VPAID Flash files, “maybe in the hope of protecting some trade secret”, suggested the researchers. In doing so they “completely ruined the security model originally thought out with VAST.”
Subsequently, the advertising ecology from Real Time Bidding (RTB) which has allowed a torrent of poison in display ads, was exported to the video advertising market.
Programmatic advertisements now account for 39 per cent of that market according to a recent study by eMarketer.
The result is that: “Publishers now have no idea who serves what ads on their websites, making it virtually impossible to police for compliance and security – unless they rely on dedicated audit and scanning technology.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK Mobile Operator Could Block Ads At Network Level
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/15/11/24/2110239/uk-mobile-operator-could-block-ads-at-network-level
UK network operator EE says it is investigating the possibility of blocking adverts at a network level, allowing customers to limit the types and frequency of adverts they see in browsers and applications. The move is likely to concern digital publishers, many of whom rely on advertising revenue to fund their content. Ad blockers have become more popular in recent times, with many users employing them to save battery life, consume less data and protect against malvertising attacks.
EE proposes restrictions on mobile adverts
Chief executive Olaf Swantee launches strategic review over measure against ‘intrusive or crass’ ads that ‘can drive people crazy’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/12008197/EE-proposes-restrictions-on-mobile-adverts.html
EE, Britain’s biggest mobile operator, is considering introducing technology that will hand smartphone users the power to control the advertising they see online, in a clampdown that would cause major upheaval in the £2bn mobile advertising market.
Olaf Swantee, EE’s chief executive, has launched a strategic review that will decide whether the operator should help its 27 million customers to restrict the quantity and type of advertising that reaches their devices, amid concern over increasingly intrusive practices.
The review will look at options for creating new tools for subscribers that would allow them to block some forms of advertising on the mobile web and potentially within apps, such as banners that pop up on top of pages or videos that play automatically. EE customers could also get the ability to control the overall volume of advertising.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Companies Want To Insert Ads Into Unicode
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/30/1430257/companies-want-to-insert-ads-into-unicode
Food company Nestle has started a petition to get a KitKat emoji into the Unicode standard. They aren’t alone, Taco Bell wants a taco emoji added, and Durex suggested adding a condom.
Give us a break KitKat, emojis ain’t free ad slots
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2015/11/25/give-us-a-break-kitkat-emojis-aint-free-ad-slots/
KitKat is heading towards hitting its rather conservative petition goal on Change.org aimed at convincing the Unicode Consortium to accept a new /‘\ emoji, a snapping KitKat, as the universal symbol for taking 10 minutes away from your desk.
This isn’t the first emoji stunt created by a brand and facilitated by the world’s petitioning platform, Taco Bell fought and won its attempt to get the traditional Mexican dish that has made its name accepted in the Unicode 8.0 update in June this year.
In a bid to promote safe sex, meanwhile, Durex recently announced that it would be submitting a condom emoji to be considered for addition by the Unicode Consortium on 1 December, World Aids Day.
However, since Emojis were first introduced in October 2010, now totalling some 1,282 icons to express who you are, what you’re doing or how you’re feeling, the Unicode Consortium has so far resisted brand grabs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Campaign Features Internet Trolls On Roadside Billboards
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/30/1442201/new-campaign-features-internet-trolls-on-roadside-billboards
A campaign taking shape in Brazil seeks to fight online harassment in an unusual way: by posting the abusive comments on real billboards. “The group collects comments from Facebook or Twitter and uses geolocation tools to find out where the people who have posted them live. They then buy billboard space nearby and post the comments in huge letters, although names and photos are pixelated.”
Targeting racist trolls by putting their comments on billboards
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34945756
Brazilians who post racist abuse online may see their words blown up and pasted onto billboards near their houses.
The campaign is called “Virtual racism, real consequences” and it’s backed by Criola, a civil rights organisation run by Afro-Brazilian women. The group collects comments from Facebook or Twitter and uses geolocation tools to find out where the people who have posted them live. They then buy billboard space nearby and post the comments in huge letters, although names and photos are pixelated.
The campaign was sparked by an incident where a popular black weather presenter became the target of crude racist remarks.
The billboard campaign has been running since the summer, and Werneck says she has received mostly positive reactions, including many from Brazilians who aren’t black. The campaign has also generated some debate on the social networks it’s highlighting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sydney Ember / New York Times:NEW
Digital ad spending will overtake TV as biggest category by 2017 or 2018, forecasts say
Digital Ad Spending Expected to Soon Surpass TV
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/business/media/digital-ad-spending-expected-to-soon-surpass-tv.html?_r=0
Television has lost its longtime grip on advertising budgets as digital ad spending continues to surge, according to some of the advertising industry’s most closely watched forecasts to be released on Monday.
Television ad sales are expected to fall slightly this year, decreasing globally for the first time ever aside from a recession year, according to the Interpublic Group’s Magna Global.
TV will account for 38.4 percent of the $503 billion global ad market this year and will drop to 38 percent of the market in 2016, according to the forecast.
In the meantime, digital media will continue its meteoric rise. Digital ad spending will grow 17.2 percent this year, to nearly $160 billion, and 13.5 percent in 2016, and is expected to overtake TV as the biggest advertising category by the end of 2017, the forecast says.
Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia expects digital media to pass TV in 2018.
“TV global growth is diminishing,” Vincent Letang, the head of global forecasting at Magna Global, said. “In most major developed markets, TV growth is slowing and in some cases stagnating.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Sluis / AdExchanger:
Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store says if he didn’t work for the company, he’d block ads; says ad tech not good at identifying unsavoury advertisers and ads — Guardian CEO: Why Is It So Hard To Keep Gun Ads Off Our Site? — “If I didn’t work for the Guardian, I would block ads,” said Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store.
Guardian CEO: Why Is It So Hard To Keep Gun Ads Off Our Site?
http://adexchanger.com/publishers/guardian-ceo-why-is-it-so-hard-to-keep-gun-ads-off-our-site/
“If I didn’t work for the Guardian, I would block ads,” said Guardian US CEO Eamonn Store.
He’s fed up with the poor-quality ads that slip through on the Guardian and other trusted sites.
As an avid reader of the Guardian, he sees ads for loan sharks and other unsavory ventures slip through frequently, leading to a game of whack-a-mole for the ad ops team. These advertisers often change their names frequently to escape blockage by scrupulous publishers.
But what most infuriated him was seeing ads from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which have popped up multiple times on the Guardian site through different campaign names and channels.
Such ads would never be accepted at the Guardian if they came through a direct sales channel.
“Repeat offenders often rebrand themselves under new company names, accompanied by new URLs, which enable them to slip past our blocks,” Soch said.
Store doesn’t profess to be an advertising guru. But as an outsider to the ad tech world, he has little patience for such slip-ups.
“What bothers me is that as a normal media expert, I can’t understand how we can’t be guaranteed control of the third-party ads on our site,” Store said.
If ad tech can do precise targeting, why can’t it remove ads with precision?
“The idea that in a programmatic world, we just have to get used to the fact that we never know what quite is going to appear in our most valuable places until it actually appears, doesn’t seem logical or acceptable,” Store said.
Digital advertising has gotten a free pass the way that other mediums haven’t. Store comes from TV advertising, where every ad requires approval.
“You couldn’t run a magazine company like that either,” Store said. “If you’re Anna Wintour [of Vogue] and an ad like that got into the magazine, someone would get fired.”
The digital ad industry is going down a dangerous path if it ignores how ad quality affects the user experience – with ad blocking as a prime example.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:
In places where data is more expensive, ad blockers help manage the cost, for customers and carriers
The Ad Blocking Industry: Global, Large, Threatening
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/12/06/the-ad-blocking-industry-global-large-threatening/
First ignited by anti-advertising zealots, ad blocking is now a growing business involving an “interesting” set of players. These range from opportunistic startups intending to leverage the power of cell phone carriers, to large multinational groups wanting to control the ad supply aimed at the Internet’s Next Billion.
When European or American publishers rant about the ad blocking plague, they tend to focus on browser extensions such as AdBlock Plus that eat a sizable part of their business. But the scope of the problem does vary with territories and demographics. At a European gaming site, 90% of users run an ad blocker, and a major German publisher recently stated that 40% of its monetization evaporated for the same reason. In the news business, roughly 30% of desktop users watch contents with no ads
Google gathered a couple of hundreds of its advertising partners, 23% of the audience admitted using an ad blocker. The very same crowd that sells or buy ads eliminates them while browsing the web. Interesting.
As big as it already is, this might in fact just be the tip of the iceberg. The ad blocking picture in even more startling when considered on a global scale and when the mobile internet enters the picture. There, new players are staking strategic positions.
In countries such as India, China and Indonesia (altogether 1.1 billion internet users), mobile browsing is much more prevalent that in Western countries. As one of my interlocutors explained, new digital users often go online with smartphones that don’t have sufficient capabilities to accommodate a large number of applications. In addition, data plans are expensive. In Asia, owning a mobile phone eats about 5% of the average salary, vs. 1% or 2% in Western countries (where the data consumption is at least three times higher.) Once an Indian user gets a new phone, s/he won’t go online to get his apps but go to a local store that will connect the handset to a cable and load a small number of programs. The process is often repeated as churn rates are high in these markets.
These peculiar economics make the task of selling ads on mobile quite hard. As an engineer who works in Asia told me: “It’s difficult, especially if you consider local market conditions, prices [of ads] are so low that they can fall below the cost of the data that transport them…”
Hence the appeal of adblockers.
In India (and in most Asian markets), the n°1 mobile browser, UC Browser, commands a 51% market share, leaving its competitor in the dust
Here is the catch: UC Browser comes with an ad blocker set to “on” by default. This browser promises to consume 79% less data than its competitors…
Even more interesting, UC Web is part of Alibaba Group, the giant Chinese e-commerce site: with the the equivalent of $248bn in revenue, Alibaba is bigger than Amazon and eBay combined. Hence the question: What is the n°1 e-retailer in the world doing in the ad blocking business?
It could be two things. One is that Alibaba sees ads as deteriorating the mobile browsing experience so much that they hurt e-commerce revenue. This makes sense: Google found that 49% of people leave a mobile web site if it takes longer than 6 to 10 seconds to load. The other reason could be that Alibaba wants to control the flow of advertising, to favor its own. Operating a largely deployed ad blocker means retaining a tight grip on ad filters, that is manipulate UC browser settings that selectively let “good” ads go through.
This is happens to be the very model at the core ad blocking business Eyeo GmbH, the creator of AdBlock Plus. The company might say it puts the consumer first, but when an advertising player decides to pay up, Eyeo’s virtue yields to cash.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Noah Kulwin / Re/code:
FTC issues new rules for native advertising on the Internet, which are in line with FTC’s broader stance on deceptive advertising
FTC Issues New Rules for Native Advertising on the Internet
http://recode.net/2015/12/22/ftc-issues-new-rules-to-native-advertising-on-the-internet/
The Federal Trade Commission today unveiled its rules for how native advertising on the Internet has to look, spelling out what qualifies as deceptive and what doesn’t.
The FTC’s “Enforcement Policy Statement on Deceptively Formatted Advertisements” is a wonky 16-page document that fundamentally affirms what the FTC has already said about deceptive advertising more generally. Here’s the part that best sums up its message:
“Regardless of the medium in which an advertising or promotional message is disseminated, deception occurs when consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances are misled about its nature or source, and such misleading impression is likely to affect their decisions or conduct regarding the advertised product or the advertising.”
Native advertising, also called sponsored content, is an ad that’s dressed up to look like editorial material, but theoretically has a clear designation that distinguishes it from editorial content.
For a number of digital media companies, native advertising has become a vital revenue stream that isn’t tied to the whims of Facebook traffic. Gawker Media pulls in a third of its revenue from native ads, and digital heavyweights like BuzzFeed and Vox Media* have established in-house ad agencies to focus on crafting the stuff.
A number of years ago, before Facebook completely overwhelmed digital media publishers, there was a grand debate about the ethics of native advertising and sponsored content.
FTC Issues Enforcement Policy Statement Addressing “Native” Advertising and Deceptively Formatted Advertisements
FTC Staff Also Releases Business Guidance on Native Advertising
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/12/ftc-issues-enforcement-policy-statement-addressing-native
Tomi Engdahl says:
George Slefo / Ad Age:
Video game and entertainment site IGN says 40% of its audience uses ad-blockers — For IGN, a Tech-Savvy Audience Means a Big Hit From Ad Blockers — IGN’s Ad-Block Rate Balloons to 40% — $137.8B … In an effort to better understand IGN’s audience, VP of Product
For IGN, a Tech-Savvy Audience Means a Big Hit From Ad Blockers
IGN’s Ad-Block Rate Balloons to 40%
http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad-blockers/301767/
In an effort to better understand IGN’s audience, VP of Product Innovation Todd Northcutt installed ad blocking software on his browser for the first time last week. “The biggest difference to me is speed,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me; I know the load times for our pages, but man, a website that loads in 3 seconds versus 10 seconds has a difference of night and day.”
Mr. Northcutt has been watching the website’s audience use ad blocking software at an alarming rate. Last year, about 25% of IGN’s audience were using ad blocking software. Today, that number has ballooned to 40%. He says the video game and entertainment news site suffers more from ad blockers than other publications because of its audience.
“They are definitely tech-savvy,” Mr. Northcutt said. “We’re not the reason that ad block is growing, but we are caught up in that net. I think it is more of a direct reaction as what ads are doing”
The video game and entertainment news site says it attracts about 80 million users each month, with the majority of them falling into the coveted 18-to-34-year-old category. IGN, which is owned by Ziff Davis, has been relentlessly expanding onto as many different devices — from Xbox consoles to Roku devices — to increase its reach.
“We don’t have a lot of data on who an ad blocker is, but my guess is those are some of the most valuable people that advertisers want to reach the most,” Mr. Northcutt said. “How do you appeal to your audience in ways where they are not explicitly telling you ‘I don’t want this?’ I do wonder if they are objecting to display ads and pre rolls ads with ad blocker and if reaching them through another vehicle will be effective.”
About half of IGN’s traffic comes from people on mobile devices, “Mobile ad blocking is our new worry,” she said.
Running ads that require a lot of bandwidth might turn a mobile reader with a limited data plan to ad blocking, Ms. Prough said. To help counter that, IGN will run fewer ads on its home page starting next year.
Publications with different audiences may be less exposed.
Purch has a portfolio that includes Tom’s Hardware, Business News Daily, Space.com and Top 10 Reviews, among others. The media company says it has a combined reach of 100 million monthly users.
The company sees an ad block rate from 9% to 25% domestically across its portfolio, said Mike Kisseberth, chief revenue officer at Purch. “The more technically advanced the user, the more likely they are to block. We definitely see that,” Mr. Kisseberth said. “Our block rates are higher on Tom’s Hardware because those users are more tuned in and are more likely to jump at installing an ad blocker.”
In Europe, ad block rates reach as high as 40% for Purch. “That’s a foreshadowing clue of what’s to come here in the U.S.,” Mr. Kisseberth said. “I think it has been more talked about in Europe and people are taking advantage of it.”
“If you are in this business and you are not using ad blockers you’re crazy,” Mr. Kisseberth said regarding his recent install of ad blocking software on his browser. “It is a better experience and that’s scary.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Davies / Digiday:
Incisive Media becomes second UK publisher to ban ad blocker users — Incisive Media, home to titles including The Inquirer and Risk, could become the second British publisher to ban ad blocker users on some of its websites in the new year. — The publisher, which has a mix of subscription-based …
Incisive Media becomes second UK publisher to ban ad blocker users
http://digiday.com/publishers/incisive-media-become-second-u-k-publisher-ban-ad-blocker-users/
Incisive Media, home to titles including The Inquirer and Risk, could become the second British publisher to ban ad blocker users on some of its websites in the new year.
The publisher, which has a mix of subscription-based and ad-funded magazines, is seeing 40 percent of its traffic affected by visitors with ad blockers enabled, across the titles with more technology-savvy audiences, with other titles such as subscription-based financial brand Risk, seeing 10-15 percent of traffic affected.
Incisive Media’s managing director and former AOP chairman, John Barnes, said publishers must step up and take responsibility for their own part in the ad-blocking debacle, rather than “feel sorry for themselves” and continue to shift blame around.
“Publishers have partly caused the problems by letting their sites become too open and letting too many ads in, which clearly led to us not respecting the user or the content,” he said.
Now it’s tackling the issue at its source, overhauling its digital properties to ensure user experience is at its best, which in turn creates better experiences for advertisers. “Imagine if you walked into Harrods and were hit by a wave of people trying to stuff leaflets in your pockets — it would ruin the experience. It’s exactly the same thing,” he added.
On the other hand, it’s no charity. If visitors want to continue consuming content for free they must be prepared to accept that Incisive must fund them via advertising, according to Barnes. Therefore, in the new year, it will trial a mix of approaches across its titles.
Currently, the publishers to have openly banned website visitors with ad blockers enabled include Axel Springer-owned Bild, City AM and the Washington Post. Just yesterday, Forbes joined their ranks. Barnes praised all approaches, adding that their more aggressive stances had led to visitors switching off their ad blockers. He said it will take an approach “akin” to these titles next year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now one smartphone maker is building in ad blocking as standard
http://uk.businessinsider.com/asus-browser-comes-with-adblock-plus-pre-installed-2015-12
The laptop and smartphone maker Asus has partnered with Adblock Plus to introduce ad blocking as a default option on its mobile devices, Motherboard reports.
The proprietary Asus Browser will be set to automatically block website ads — except those that appear on Adblock Plus’ “Acceptable Ads” whitelist, which lets through ads that aren’t deemed interruptive to the browsing experience.
Browsers Are Starting to Block Ads by Default
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/browsers-are-starting-to-block-ads-by-default
Tomi Engdahl says:
You Don’t Want A 5-Star Review
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/03/you-dont-want-a-5-star-review/
Brands know that customer reviews play an integral role in consumers’ purchasing decisions, especially online. As such, they work hard to drive the highest ratings they can. And yet, it’s the presence of less-than-five-star reviews that can actually be what drives purchase.
Recent data analysis across 40 product categories looked at the impact of reading reviews on purchases. Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews found that, in moderation, bad reviews actually help boost sales.
In fact, product purchases were most influenced by reviews with an average star rating between 4.2 and 4.5. Products with five-star ratings were less influenced, likely due to today’s skeptical consumers’ “ too good to be true” sensibilities. Having a few less-than-perfect reviews decreases a product’s average star rating, but grows the business more.
Why are five-star reviews too good to be true? We think it’s authenticity.
There’s a healthy cynic in us all. We know nothing is perfect. So when a consumer sees only five-star reviews, they smell something fishy, something that causes their BS meter to go off.
They know that some negative opinions about a product, service or place are to be expected, and become suspicious when something is marketed as “perfect.”
Healthy skepticism is growing for advertising, journalism and, so too, for perfect product reviews. A mix of good and bad reviews demonstrates a brand’s transparency, and may well signal that the reviews displayed on your website are not fake or filtered.
Offer (and test) options
Offer several options for reading reviews, from highest to lowest star rating or by ranking those as most “helpful.” This same strategy can be used for product offerings, your blog and other content. Include several options for current and potential customers to find the information they seek; customers are always receptive to a more personalized experience.
Value the content
The content of the reviews is another influencer of purchase behavior. When consumers read the review to find out why the product received a specific rating, what may appear to be a negative review can prompt a purchase.
For example, if a product has a four-star rating instead of five because the reviewer thinks it’s “not the right shade of red,” it may be just the message to prompt another purchaser to buy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What We Can Do with Ad Blocking’s Leverage
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/what-we-can-do-ad-blockings-leverage
“Never waste a crisis,” Rahm Emanuel is said to have said. And publishers — including Linux Journal — have one now. According to PageFair and Adobe, the number of people blocking ads on their browsers has passed 200 million, worldwide, increasing annually by 42% in the U.S. and 82% in the U.K. Most of the blockers also block tracking, which is a main way that ads are aimed at readers through online publishers.
It’s interesting to see how closely the rise in ad blocking follows the rise in discussion of surveillance-fed advertising.
2005 — ad tag, mobile engagement
2006 — ad-tech, search analytics
2007 — behavioral targeting, retargeting, third party data, SEM tools, content analytics, microtargeting, do not track
2008 — deal id, ad fraud, social marketing management
2009 — real time message
2010 — demand side platform, cross-device, advertising beacon, social ad network, predictive marketing
2011 — in-stream, real time bidding, creative optimization, search retargeting
2012 — clickstream data, data management platform, mobile reengagement, native advertising, adblock war
2013 — programmatic marketing, programmatic advertising, subscription push, agency trading desk, content marketing platform
2014 — supply side platform, data aggregators
2015 — cross device tracking
By blocking ads and tracking, users are marking down the value of digital advertising to that of spam while also giving themselves a great deal of leverage, both individually and collectively.
How will they use that leverage? I see two ways: 1) encouraging adverting with high signal value; and 2) signaling their own intentions, which will be far more valuable than adtech’s expensive guesswork could ever be.
The highest signal value is in old-fashioned brand advertising. This is the uncomplicated kind that sustained all of commercial publishing and broadcasting for centuries, never tracked anybody, and still comprises most of the world’s advertising (including your monthly Linux Journal). At worst it’s annoying and wasteful; at best it’s useful, interesting and a form of art. (Seen any beautiful adtech lately? Or ever?),
Yet lots of pipe dreams do come true. Back in the ’80s, when I worked with Sun Microsystems and other competing UNIX makers, I despaired that there would ever be a free (as in freedom) *nix in the world. Too many giant tech companies were rolling their own, while weirdly trying to reconcile all of them to AT&T’s SVR4 (System 5, Release 4). Then Linux happened. And the Web. And universal email, file transfer and the rest of it. Can we do it for intentcasting?
Don’t tell me. Just point to whatever work is happening.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lara O’Reilly / Business Insider:
As some in advertising industry criticize Pinterest’s ad efforts, the company touts 5X YoY revenue growth in 2015, and plans to expand ad offerings in 2016
Insiders say what’s going on inside $11 billion Pinterest — and it’s not all good
http://uk.businessinsider.com/pinterest-worth-11-billion-valuation-revenue-grow-5x-2015?r=US&IR=T
The visual scrapbook platform should be printing money. Its predominantly female audience browses Pinterest’s various boards for inspiration about their next fashion purchases, vacation destination, or on how to decorate a house — and they also act as free brand representatives by “pinning” their favorite products, making them visible to others.
It’s an ideal environment for advertisers. But Pinterest has taken a somewhat of a soft approach to advertising so far.
That strategy has irked some within the ad industry — one exec told us Pinterest looked “amateur” compared with the “slick” sales operations of its digital-media counterparts. One Silicon Valley figure feared Pinterest was “moving too slow.” A former Pinterest sales staffer told us the company hesitated to close big deals and those clients moved on to rival platforms instead.
But for all the negativity leveled at it, Pinterest isn’t a company on the wane. Far from it. Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s general manager for monetization, told Business Insider the company’s revenue in 2015 was more than five times as high as it was in 2014 — an enviable position for any company — and that most of that was repeat business.
Those advertisers that do find value in Pinterest appear to be spending ever increasing amounts.
Plenty of evidence suggests Pinterest is an extremely effective platform — for both paid-for promotions and engagement with organic content. It drives nearly as much traffic to the online marketplace Etsy as Facebook does, for example.
And an October report from eMarketer shows US marketers rate Pinterest on par with Twitter and ahead of Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn when it comes ad social ad effectiveness.
What makes Pinterest so appealing is that it delivers discovery of content, products, and curation closer to the point of purchase better than nearly any other platform
Some people in the ad industry think that as Pinterest reaches maturity it can start competing for search advertising dollars, thanks to its rich layer of intent data about the types of products its users want to purchase.
“If you’re looking at where Pinterest can truly start stealing dollars from Google, it’s not necessarily for brand [keyword] terms — it’s more for the non-brand terms. Pinterest will not only compete but also win those dollars.”
But many agency executives we spoke with disagree. They say Pinterest simply isn’t yet front-of-mind for ad clients, compared with competing digital platforms.
A digital director at one global agency told us: “Pinterest’s big global competitors have become slick sales and marketing machines, which engage global brands at the most senior levels and increasingly steal the show at industry events like Cannes, CES, and SXSW. In comparison, Pinterest looks amateur”
One marketer said: “Their strategy has become a little confusing from an external standpoint … any company that doesn’t bake monetization in from the beginning really risks alienating its base.”
A source with knowledge of Pinterest’s sales organization described it as “one of the gnarliest places to work,” in terms of the difficulty in getting things done. Executives there have little power as decisions about the commercial future are made “in a vacuum” by the company’s founders, who are more focused on the consumer product, he said.
Despite the dim view taken by some observers, 2015 was an eventful year for Pinterest.
Kendall, Pinterest’s general manager for monetization, told Business Insider Pinterest had grown revenue by “more than 5X” between 2014 and 2015.
Pinterest’s renewal rate in its direct channels — where it works with its largest customers — was 70% between the second and third quarters, Kendall said. The company’s second half to first half “intended re-up rate” for its midmarket customers was 90%.
Big ad launches this year include the launch of a new animated ad unit called “cinematic pins”; new targeting options including being able to buy based on personas; allowing marketers to buy ads based on their business objectives; creating “buyable pins” that allow users to purchase products without leaving the Pinterest platform; and opening up its advertising API, letting advertisers purchase Pinterest ads through accredited third-parties.
Pinterest moved back to target ‘low-hanging fruit’
Most notably, Kendall also led the move to narrow Pinterest’s ad focus on just two categories, retailers and consumer-packaged-goods brands, as The Wall Street Journal first reported in December.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michelle Castillo / CNBC:
Sources: Yahoo’s programmatic ad program generates mostly fraudulent traffic, ad management system is broken
Inside Yahoo’s troubled advertising business
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/07/yahoos-troubled-advertising-business.html
Between a sinking stock, an embattled CEO and restless investors demanding that the company be dismantled, these are not great days for Internet pioneer Yahoo.
Now add one more headache: The company’s ad business, which brought in $1.15 billion in the second quarter of 2015, is rife with ad fraud, multiple sources told CNBC.
Executives at several media companies and media advisory firms with direct dealings with Yahoo’s ad business said the company’s programmatic video ad platform generates mostly fraudulent ad traffic, and otherwise does not work as promised. The platform is largely powered by BrightRoll, which was acquired by Yahoo in November 2014.
One company that used Yahoo’s programmatic video ad platform said it discovered 30 to 70 percent of its ads were not running in areas where Yahoo was claiming they were. Most of the problems were tied to the fact that although it was paying $20 CPMs (cost per thousand views) for pre-roll advertising (ads that appear before a video), its ads were appearing in videos inside banners, which should have only been one-tenth of the price.
Another source said that it found BrightRoll’s traffic was mostly coming from data centers’ IP addresses, suggesting most of the ad views were nonhuman and fraudulent.
To be fair, ad fraud is a widespread problem not limited to Yahoo. A report by Distil Networks in October claimed that advertising fraud would cost the industry about $18.5 billion a year. For perspective, the Interactive Advertising Bureau projected that U.S. digital ad revenue reached $27.5 billion during the first six months of 2015.
Ad fraud occurs when digital advertisements are not being seen by the viewers companies paid to get in front of. In addition to creating nonhuman “impressions” or page views through bot networks, other known ad fraud practices include placing 1 pixel-sized advertisements on trusted websites which are invisible to the human eye. Sometimes, advertisements don’t appear on the media sites or places the paying company believes they are.
On top of that, Katz believes user experience on the website has made it hard to find relevant content. It can all be tied to Yahoo’s focus on algorithms and programmatic functions, he said.
“I believe Yahoo content has really lost its soul in the process,”
Bloomberg Business:
Sources: Yahoo reassesses whether to spinoff its main Internet business, considers outright sale — Yahoo to Reconsider Sale of Web Business Instead of Spinoff — A decision to sell would contradict Yahoo’s intent to spin — Verizon has publicly stated interest in acquiring Yahoo
Yahoo to Reconsider Sale of Web Business Instead of Spinoff
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-08/yahoo-said-to-reconsider-sale-of-web-business-instead-of-spinoff
Tomi Engdahl says:
You say advertising, I say block that malware
http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/
Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers then immediately served them pop-under malware.
The real reason online advertising is doomed and adblockers thrive? Its malware epidemic is unacknowledged, and out of control.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.
One researcher commented on Twitter that the situation was “ironic” — and while it’s certainly another variant of hackenfreude, ironic isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what happened.
That’s because this situation spotlights what happened in 2015 to billions — yep, billions — of people who were victims of virus-infected ads which were spread via ad networks like germs from a sneeze across the world’s most popular websites.
Less than a month ago, a bogus banner ad was found serving malvertising to visitors of video site DailyMotion. After discovering it, security company Malwarebytes contacted the online ad platform the bad ad was coming through, Atomx. The company blamed a “rogue” advertiser on the WWPromoter network.
It was estimated the adware broadcast through DailyMotion put 128 million people at risk. To be specific, it was from the notorious malware family called “Angler Exploit Kit.” Remember this name, because I’m pretty sure we’re going to be getting to know it a whole lot better in 2016.
Last August, Angler struck MSN.com with — you guessed it — another drive-by malvertising campaign. It was the same campaign that had infected Yahoo visitors back in July (an estimated 6.9 billion visits per month, it’s considered the biggest malvertising attack so far).
It’s crazy to consider what a perfect marriage this is, between the advertisers and the criminals pushing the exploit kits. They have a lot in common.
Both try to trick us into giving them something we don’t want to.
It actually makes business sense to think about malware attacks like an advertiser. You want to deliver your infection to, and scrape those dollars from, every little reader out there. You need a targeted delivery system, with the widest distribution, and as many clueless middlemen as possible.
It’s easy to want to blame Reader’s Digest, or Yahoo, or Forbes, or Daily Mail, or any of these sites for screwing viewers by serving them malicious ads and not telling them, or not helping them with the cleanup afterward. And it’s a hell of a lot easier when they’ve compelled us to turn off our ad blockers to simply see what brought us to their site.
But the problem is coming through them, from the ad networks themselves.
So, to my friend on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list — a malware researcher, which I’ll concede is actually ironic — I’m sorry I won’t be seeing your time in that particular spotlight.
Tomi Engdahl says:
eMarketer:
US Digital Display Ad Spending to Surpass Search Ad Spending in 2016
US Digital Display Ad Spending to Surpass Search Ad Spending in 2016
Video will also command a large portion of ad spending allocated to digital
- See more at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-Digital-Display-Ad-Spending-Surpass-Search-Ad-Spending-2016/1013442#sthash.ElQHhtxP.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adblock blocked from attending ad industry talkfest
‘Punting us won’t make online ads suck less’, chime miffed content killers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/19/adblock_party_flops_have_invite_to_admen_confab_slop_chopped/
Content crasher Adblock says it has been uninvited from an advertising industry confab after paying a pricey entrance fee.
The online advertising scrubber will have to stay home and sob after the Interactive Advertising Bureau reneged on its approval for the Annual Leadership bash in California this weekend.
Adblock, which as the name suggests blocks online advertising for its users, paid and turned up to last year’s event in what surely caused delegates to ask ‘who invited him’.
Members of the US$50 billion online advertising game would seem to have taken issue with Adblock’s return.
Adblock urges advertising companies to follow its criteria for acceptable ads, a feat that surely makes it the bore at the cocaine content confab.
Ad blocking is not just a tool of content pirates who would rather stem revenue streams than stare at flashing gifs; the dangerous and explosive rise of malvertising gives blockers, including script blockers, a major security benefit since it reduces net user exposure to ransomware and other malware.
IAB dis-invites us, disses compromise and buries dissent · 2016-01-15 15:28 by Ben Williams
https://adblockplus.org/blog/iab-dis-invites-us-disses-compromise-and-buries-dissent
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kelly Liyakasa / AdExchanger:
Google rolling out “Real-time ads” allowing pre-planned ads to appear at specific times, first for select brands, then more broadly later this year
Google Debuts ‘Real-Time Ads’ To Drive Live Engagement
http://adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/google-unveils-real-time-ads-drive-live-engagement/
Google sounds more and more like Twitter, heralding ways marketers can tap into live events for engagement.
As such, the company on Wednesday rolled out a new ad product called Real-Time Ads at a press event in New York.
With Real-Time Ads, Google aims to capitalize on the ripple effect of live events, such as sports events, political rallies or awards shows, along with all of the consumer and brand conversations that arise because of them.
The format can be “dynamically inserted” across YouTube, “hundreds of thousands of apps” and about two million sites across the Google Display Network, according to Tara Walpert Levy, managing director of agency sales for Google.
“It’s a way for marketers to launch ads that are relevant and timely to what’s happening during a live event, and connect with audiences in a deeper way,” Walpert Levy said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Developers:
Facebook expands its Audience Network ad product to serve the mobile web in addition to apps
Audience Network for Mobile Web Brings More Value to Publishers & Advertisers
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/01/26/audience-network-for-mobile-web/
Today the Audience Network is expanding to include support for mobile web, bringing the value of native ad formats and people-based marketing to a new set of publishers. We’re also enabling 2.5 million Facebook advertisers to reach more of the people they care about on mobile devices.
Since its October 2014 launch, the Audience Network has been delivering real value for people, publishers and advertisers; we recently shared that in Q4 2015 we reached a billion dollar annual run rate for advertising spend through the Audience Network, with the bulk of that value being passed to publishers. Our focus is on creating real outcomes for advertisers, such as sales or app installs, and providing publishers with a metric to optimize towards with our Advertiser Outcome Score. Unlike other networks, the Audience Network rewards quality publishers based on the value they create for advertisers.
Digital media consumption in mobile web browsers grew 53 percent from 2013 to 20151. In fact, on average news sites receive approximately 40 percent of their traffic from mobile devices2 and 93 percent of their mobile audiences come via mobile web1.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Reaches 1.59 Billion Users And Beats Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
Facebook Climbs To 1.59 Billion Users And Crushes Q4 Estimates With $5.8B Revenue
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/facebook-earnings-q4-2015/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_8833995700530840123#.ojwuxm:0hzp
By courting users and ad dollars in the developing world, Facebook continued its growth streak. It hit 1.59 billion users today and crushed the street’s estimates in its Q4 2015 earnings with $5.841 billion in revenue and $0.79 earnings per share. That’s up from 1.55 billion users and $4.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Even with Q4 being the holidays, that 29.8% QoQ revenue growth is stunning, and it’s up 51% vs Q4 last year.
Facebook’s monthly user count grew a bit slower at 2.58% quarter over quarter from Q3’s extremely strong 4.02% growth. It shows Facebook is hitting saturation in some markets but still has room to grow in many developing countries.
Though not as flashy as the big monthly number, daily user count is a better way to chart Facebook’s progress. Facebook’s DAU hit 1.04 billion compared to 1.01 billion in Q3, up 2.97%. Facebook’s DAU to MAU ratio, or stickyness, held firm at 65%. That means users aren’t visiting less even as the service ages.
Mobile now makes up a massive 80% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, up from 78% in Q3. $5.63 billion of its total revenue came from advertising, overshadowing Facebook’s old payments business. Mobile-only users now number 827 million, up a swift 13.2% from 723 million last quarter. That’s a testament to Facebook growth in the developing world that largely skipped the full-sized computer age.
Update: Mark Zuckerberg also released a slew of new stats during the Q4 Earnings call:
100 million hours of video watched per day
1 billion users on Groups
80 million users on Facebook Lite
500 million users on Events
123 million events created in 2015
50 million small and medium sized business on Pages
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Marketing Land:
Hashtags included in 45% of Super Bowl ads; Facebook or Twitter mentioned in only 5% of ads
Hashtags In Super Bowl Ads Dropped Slightly To 45% In 2016
As with last year, social networks were rarely mentioned, with Twitter and Facebook tied in our count.
http://marketingland.com/hashtags-super-bowl-163101
Hashtags were in 45 percent of Super Bowl 50 ads, slightly down from 50 percent last year. Twitter and Facebook tied as the most-mentioned social networks, though neither was explicitly mentioned often.
The statistics are from our fifth annual Hashtag Bowl count of hashtags, URLs and social media network inclusions with ads during the Super Bowl.
Total national ads (kickoff to end-of-game): 60
Hashtags in ads: 27 total, in 45 percent of ads overall
URLs in ads: 21 total, in 35 percent of ads overall
Twitter in ads: 3 total, 5 percent of ads overall
Facebook: 3 total points for four ads (see note further below), 5 percent of ads overall