Monthly Archives: December 2014

December 10, 2014 · 1:09 pm

The Other Side Of Ad Blocking

Yesterday I posted about how some publishers, in a drive for revenues, have gone way too far with respect to ads.  Their loyalty to their investors has beaten down their loyalty to their users which has precipitated the rise of ad blocking software.  Today I want to look at another side of this except it’s far less fun that simple ad blocking.  This side is criminal.

I have been working off and on with a group of folks trying to get a niche sports site off the ground.  Their traffic has been growing steadily and was fairly impressive for a year-old operation.  We discussed how they were doing their marketing to grow the traffic and how a company I won’t rat out here had been doing a good job in helping them grow.  As I drilled down into their analytics, it became very obvious that a lot of the traffic – close to 90% of it – was coming from machines and not from human users.  The firm they were using was buying traffic from robots.  Lots of it.

It’s not particularly hard to spot something like that if you’re willing to look.  Which is why the latest report from the Association of National Advertisers and WhiteOps is so disturbing.  Some of the findings per analysts at SunTrust Robinson Humphreys:

  • Up to 50 percent of publisher traffic is bot activity, just fake clicks from automated computing programs.
  • Bots account for 11 percent of display ad views and 23 percent of video ads.
  • Digital advertising will take in $43.8 billion next year, and $6.3 billion will be based on the fraudulent activity.
  • More than half of traffic from third parties claiming to lift publishers’ traffic numbers comes from bots.

In other words, fraud.  Despite the incredible growth of digital advertising over the last few years, it’s still a nascent industry, once which still has many doubters in the marketing community. The reports aren’t helping but let’s not shoot the messenger. Publishers can take countermeasures – how many of them do? I spent 10 minutes and not only identified fake traffic but could pinpoint the sources and recommend installing filters to block it.  I suspect that no publisher wants to blow up a significant part of their traffic – my client certainly didn’t want to.  But ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away and will lead to much bigger problems down the road.  I don’t think it’s a road we want to travel. Do you?

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Filed under digital media, Reality checks

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December 9, 2014 · 2:19 pm

Learning From Limewire

Gather round, youngsters.  I’m here to tell you the story of how the record industry got rid of piracy.  You see, many years ago, back when the interwebs was just a tiny series of tubes with barely anyone on it, there was this company called Limewire.  It began around the turn of the new century in 2000.  It was one of a number of peer-to-peer services that some bad people were using to share the music that they had bought thinking

English: Logo of Adblock plus Deutsch: Logo vo...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

that they owned it.  The folks that sold the music – the recording industry – sued Limewire and a bunch of the other companies too.  This, they said, would assure that piracy would end and the music business would remain healthy.  I’ll let you kids figure out if that’s really the case (hint – not so much).

Suing a company out of existence (and Limewire isn’t exactly out of existence, just sort of in limbo) rarely kills off the idea behind it.  For example, Aereo may be dead but the demand to stream local TV isn’t gone (neither is the piracy of signals).  So I read today’s story on something going on in France with a bemused smile:

On grounds that it represents a major economic threat to their business, two groups of French publishers are considering a lawsuit against AdBlockPlus creator Eyeo GmbH. (Les Echos, broke the news in this story, in French).

Plaintiffs are said to be the GESTE and the French Internet Advertising Bureau. The first is known for its aggressive stance against Google via its contribution to the Open Internet Project. (To be clear, GESTE said they were at a “legal consulting stage”, no formal complaint has been filed yet.) By his actions, the second plaintiff, the French branch of the Internet Advertising Bureau is in fact acknowledging its failure to tame the excesses of the digital advertising market.

That sums it up nicely.  The problem isn’t that people want to block ads.  The problem is that publishers have destroyed the viewing/reading experience.  There are plenty of studies that testify to consumers’ willingness to participate in the attention/value exchange.  You give me valuable content, I will give you my (and your ads) my attention. People didn’t seem to mind banner ads, even if they were for products that didn’t fit the site.  They were easily ignored.  Then came pop-up ads, leading to the use of pop-up blockers. Then advertisers/publishers started using Flash to make animated ads with sound, leading to the use of Flash blockers. Then they started using Javascript to hijack pages and force people to view ads, leading to the use of Javascript blockers.  It just keeps escalating, and finally, maybe, even into court.

The AdBlock product isn’t completely clean either.  One can question their motives when they say “We are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.”  Limewire bundled spyware.  That doesn’t change the reality in either case.  The problems these products are solving were created by choosing your own business interests over those of your consumers.  You can’t solve that problem in court.  You agree?

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Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

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December 8, 2014 · 11:58 am

The Motivation Test

I spent some time over the weekend thinking about motives.  I’ll admit that I fall into the camp of people who tend to ascribe malevolent intent to many of the seemingly innocent things that happen to each of us each day.  I also admit that it’s misguided to do so.  As I wrote a few months back, people tend to be more stupid than they are evil.  Add oblivious to that list.  That, however, isn’t really today’s thought.

English: Human figure with thought bubbles

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My thinking led me to this.  What is important is that people do question why we do what we do as businesses and businesspeople.  They look at two things – actions and motives.  When our actions are tone-deaf or out of sync with someone’s desires, they let us know.  Maybe it’s by lack of purchase; maybe it’s via social media.  In those cases we can usually apologize, explain that we recognize the error of our previous course of action, acknowledge bad decision-making, and promise to do better.

Where we run into issues is when the consumer, partner, or employee looks at our motives.  Yes, they will do that in the course of receiving the aforementioned apology.  That’s where we can’t screw up.  I’ve found that people are very willing to forgive if your intentions were good even if your actions were wrong.  We get into much deeper and hotter water when our motives were as wrong as our actions.

It’s not about rationalization.  In many cases where we screw up, our actions can be rationalized but not justified. In fact, almost any action can be rationalized, but justification requires something more.  I think that something more is the underlying intentions – our motives.

I get that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and it’s important to act on those intentions.  When we screw up in so doing, the inevitable examination of those intentions needs to check out.   If we don’t pass that exam, we can’t possibly succeed at business.  You agree?

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