Tag Archives: Digital marketing

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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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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November 3, 2014 · 1:52 pm

The 40% Chance Of Fraud

If there was a 40% chance that when you bought something you weren’t going to get what you thought you were buying, would you take that risk? I wouldn’t, but apparently many advertisers and/or their agencies do so every day. Ghostery, which is a browser extension I use and would heartily endorse, says its research shows 40% of all URLs in automated ad auctions are masked. What is URL masking? As a recent Ad Age article defined it:

URL masking is often used to trick advertisers into running ads on sites with illicit or stolen content, which tend to generate lots of traffic but little ad revenue. URL masking is also used to fool buyers into thinking they’re buying premium inventory when they are instead getting low quality placements.

Ouch.  Then again, this is just one of the issues that have arisen as programmatic ad buying becomes more prevalent.  As a former TV sales guy, I just don’t get it.  Oh sure – the costs of machines that are supervised by a couple of people is far less than the cost of the number of people required to do the equivalent work.  But look what happens when it’s just machines.

Ask anyone connected with the programmatic ad business what the top three issues are and they should answer:

  1. Fraud
  2. Fraud
  3. Fraud

Traffic generated by bots, ads that are run underneath pages to generate impressions when no one is seeing them, fake sites which spoof domain names that clear buyers’ whitelists because they look like they belong to reputable publishers.   That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Another big issue is how little of what the buyers are paying actually reaches publishers – middleman upon middleman taking their cut drives revenues to the content creators down.

Putting aside the need for transparency, I’m not a Luddite.  I know programmatic ad buying is an advantageous, time and cost-effective process.  But the machines can’t do everything.  In fact, someone has to understand the business well enough (and all of those bad actors who would seek to steal from it) to program the algorithms.  Someone needs to bring the 40% chance down to 0%.  Someone else has to come up with the next brilliant, breakthrough idea.  It won’t be a machine.

You?

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