Two layers of how-the-sausage-is-made

June 2, 2024 3:49 AM

Earlier this week, a giant dump of Google documents revealed how the search advertising seller linked up adverts bought to pages they're on; then Wired published an excerpt from a book explaing the link between the advertising auctions and the disinformation sites taking money to display those adverts: How Advertising Funds Disinformation (archive).

Previously.

posted by k3ninho (10 comments total)

released March 13 on Github by an automated bot called yoshi-code-bot
thank you fictional dino/bot

Click for male or female.
Click for age-group.
Click for where the target lives, down to zip code or classification of zip code (urban, suburban, wealthy, middle class).
Click for income level.
Click for education level.
Click for affiliation with a religion.
Click to limit the number of times the target will see the same ad.
Click for device used. (Is the person going to see the ad on a mobile device, on a laptop, on a streaming video service?)
Click for time of day you want the ad to run. (The programmatic specialist wouldn’t want a McDonald’s breakfast ad to run in the evening.)
Click for an “intent signal.”
posted by HearHere at 4:03 AM on June 2

also previously
posted by HearHere at 4:59 AM on June 2

Google Ads has, or had, a page where advertisers could see where their ads were being placed by Google. It was hidden beneath many layers of navigation. I paid for ads for some time, but once I heard of and found that page, and looked at the list of websites and apps where my ads were being placed.... I stopped my campaigns, closed my account and never looked back.

It's a wasteland. The sooner we move towards a post-Google, post-Facebook world, the better. Unfortunately, the new big thing, TikTok, is even worse.
posted by UN at 5:04 AM on June 2 [12 favorites]

I learned a lot from the Wired article about how the targeted ad industry currently works - thanks for posting it - and the irony of it being written by someone who was using it to advertise their advertising product was Silicon Valley perfection.
posted by clawsoon at 6:04 AM on June 2

The programmatic specialist wouldn’t want a McDonald’s breakfast ad to run in the evening.

Not necessarily. Dropping the idea of an Egg McMuffin on someone in the evening, could very well put the idea of hitting the drive-through in the morning in their head. You see breakfast ads in the evening on tv all the time, and I see no reason to think the same approach wouldn’t also work online.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:27 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

Hearhere: also previously

Thanks! I didn't spot the previously when constructing this post.
posted by k3ninho at 6:43 AM on June 2

How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?

I mean, if you're spending 10s or 100s of millions of dollars, maybe you can afford a team of 10 people who can whitelist 100 a day each, maybe, and then, what's the turnover in these websites? Like probably you can check 500 new ones a day and revalidate 500 current ones.

Sounds to me like it's very possible, if you view the internet as being something that merely reduces the cost of scaleup, not something that eliminates it completely. Of course, our world would be very different if the people who made the internet had that level of self-reflection and maturity.
posted by ambrosen at 6:49 AM on June 2 [5 favorites]

Oh, yeah, programmatic is the biggest swindle that has ever been unloaded onto advertising. For more on this I recommend reading Bob Hoffman's 50-page book Inside the Black Box. Hoffman, who writes as The Ad Contrarian, has been raising red flags about programmatic for at least a decade. He recently linked to a story in the WSJ in which a journalist created a fully automated, AI-generated disinformation site...and started making programmatic ad revenue from it. (The revenue part is just an aside, funny enough.) If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of this topic, subscribe to his newsletter.
posted by rednikki at 12:04 PM on June 2 [2 favorites]

As much as the author, Steven Brill, was using this to promote his product, he had been a media watchdog and critic for ages, which gives him at least some legitimacy with the subject. Back in the dark ages (late 90s), I was a happy subscriber to Brill's Content.

What I find more interesting, is wondering if a similar tactic that was used to propel advertisers off of X/twitter could be used here. Find an objectionable story that does not trigger any keyword filters, reload, post to social media and shame. Repeat. Repeat again until CNN/AP/BBC/etc. (essentially a network with global reach) picks up the story and distributes it widely. I'm not endorsing his product, but I wonder if doing this, we could help strip financing from the non-governmentally backed sites that help to spread conspiracies.
posted by Hactar at 3:22 PM on June 2 [1 favorite]

I'm wondering what it would take to have all the big news publishers drop Google all at once... and sell ads differently. They could auction off ad space for the amount of times an ad is served instead of clicked. Since click tracking is both unreliable and privacy nightmare anyway, it'd be two birds with one stone.

I'd hope that, if Google is left with nothing but Sputnik & Co, it'd make the big corporate advertisers jump to the real news sites and drive up prices for them.

I'd also like to see online advertisers embrace the real-time nature of the Internet and actually be able to bid on specific articles as they're published. It'd be the opposite of the black box and I think it'd be appealing since they'd know exactly where their ad is being placed.

So there's my quadrillion dollar business idea to save democracy.
posted by UN at 5:59 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]