No images? Click here TRASH MEDIA AND TRASH TECH In the past two weeks there have been two scandalous stories regarding online advertising: On the surface the stories are unrelated. But I believe there is a strong connection between them. The connection is the symbiotic relationship between trash media and trash tech. First, let's define our terms. By trash media I mean web entities that are not what they appear to be -- e.g, sites that don't actually exist; sites whose traffic is all or substantially fraudulent; sites that rely heavily on sourced traffic. By trash tech I mean ad technology that cannot reliably differentiate between legitimate web entities and fraudulent or phony entities; tech whose function, costs, or contribution to efficiencies are non-transparent. Trash media has become an important part of the online advertising ecosystem. The dirty little secret that every media person knows is that if you want to report low CPMs your recipe has to include some component of cheap, worthless junk. In other words, the way to be a hero with low CPMs requires you to go dumpster diving in the web's long tail of trash. Here's where trash tech enters the picture. Programmatic buys not only scour the web for low-cost publishers, they give trash media legitimacy by tarting it up with the mantle of technology. There is nothing that marketers like better than to stand before their lords and ladies with impressive metrics -- in this case low CPMs. Adtech now allows them to simultaneously dumpster dive and enhance their status as media scientists. Who doesn't want a slice of that? Apologists for the adtech/programmatic ecosystem will say that in all systems there is a potential for abuse, and that the waste in programmatic advertising is just an unintended effect of a system designed to optimize spending efficiency. I don't buy it. Maybe it started that way, but those days are long gone. I believe that, in part, the adtech/programmatic ecosystem has become a deceitful game of normalizing garbage by dressing it up in a lab coat. I don't think that trash media is flourishing online as an unintended effect of adtech. I think it has become an essential component of a system that is largely incomprehensible and distressingly non-transparent. Trash media enables low CPMs. Trash tech legitimizes it. How Google Dominates As mentioned above, two weeks ago a study by the ISBA and PcW that reported that half of every "programmatic" ad dollar is scraped by adtech middlemen. This week there's a new analysis about the trail of online ad dollars that may be equally disturbing. According to a paper written by Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale University, Google pockets about 40¢ of every online ad dollar before it ever gets to a publisher. Not just search dollars, not just programmatic dollars, but all online ad dollars. And there are about 130 billion of them in the US alone. Most people are aware of how dominant Google is in the search category. But Google's dominance in online advertising goes far beyond that. Their products include Double Click for Publishers, the world's largest ad serving tool; the Double Click Ad Exchange, the world's largest real-time auction house; and DV 360, the industry's leading buying tool. Ad Age reports that the Yale study claims "Google used a series of acquisitions to build a controlling position in the technology ecosystem that delivers ads across the web... The end result is that buyers and sellers of ad space have no choice but to go through Google..." According to the Wall Street Journal, over 90% of large online publishers use Google's Double Click for Publishers. Below you'll see a diagram from the Journal that illustrates how Google dominates the online ad industry. I can't make heads or tails of it, but you're a lot smarter than I am. AdAge says that the Justice Department is currently drafting an anti-trust lawsuit against Google. Google and other tech industry biggies make a great show of deference to regulators, pretend to worry about regulation, then they get in the elevator, press the down button, and giggle. Your humble blogweasel predicts that the Justice Dept lawsuit will go nowhere on a stick. Half Of COVID Tweets Are From Bots Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reported this week that after analyzing over 200 million tweets about COVID-19 since January, they concluded that about 45% were likely sent by bots, not humans. The purpose of the barrage of misinformation? According to Reuters, Russian operatives are using social media to spread disinformation and distrust about the disease, including conspiracy theories. But according to NPR, the bots have been spreading over 100 false narratives about COVID-19 on Twitter, including the idiotic idea that the disease is spread by 5G towers. Think no one is stupid enough to believe that? In the UK, dozens of 5G towers have been set afire. This does not bode well for the upcoming US presidential election. According to the professor in charge of the study, "We're seeing up to two times as much bot activity as we'd predicted based on previous natural disasters, crises and elections..." Nobody Believes Social Media The reputation that Twitter and other social media have propagated is so rancid that according to a study released this week by Forrester Analytics, only 14% of people surveyed believe that information they receive from social media is trustworthy. Who are the 14% who believe social media? You can find them at your nearest 5G tower rubbing sticks together. Are You An 86%-er? |