USAToday used to do it via deals with hotels to put one outside your room. Boom, extra copies!
They still didn't have a great idea of how effective they were a lot of the time of course.
Maybe the web needs something like Nielsen ratings, where Verified real users voluntarily submit their browsing to help advertisers determine watch time.
Unless you had something like 10% of real users or a super representative 1% I think you'd have a big problem with getting realistic numbers outside huge sites.
It probably works better on things like podcasts but the bottom line is that you can't really trust me to tell you how many viewers my site had without some fraud detection mechanisms in place. (And even then fraud is apparently pretty rampant.)
There's more about this near the end of the post.
yes, you might WANT that. but you do not NEED that. Remember that ad's isn't only effective when clicking on it, but also by spreading visibility of your offer/product.
you could easily use sites visitor count as a estimate for monthly pricing. And frankly without all tracking there would be no incentives to fake click on ads at all, so you could get your own tracking on your own side.
The web cannot do that without tracking...
You might not trust them but I don't see why you'd think a newspaper would have a harder time claiming they've made more copies than they have.
Now, you could say don't do business with people who are trying to defraud you, but one of the more impressive things about the ad ecosystem is that it works without advertisers and publishers trusting each other. I can sell the space on my site and advertisers don't need to figure out how much to trust me in particular.
It's easy to have ad fraud that's plausibly deniable and maybe even not on purpose. Let's say you're a publisher and you want more people to come to your site. You look around and you find someone who says they run a newsletter and would be willing to include links to your stories for a small fee. When you multiply out the cost per visitor this looks like a pretty good deal; you say yes. This traffic turns out to be entirely bots, but you can't tell because we got rid of ad fraud detection.
For a person who worked in ads you are surprisingly oblivious to how both Facebook and Google defrauded advertisers and publishers.
- Facebook Lied About Video Metrics and It Killed Profitable Businesses https://www.ccn.com/facebook-lied-about-video-metrics/
- Google Hit With $268 Million Fine Over Unfair Ad Practices https://gizmodo.com/google-hit-with-268-million-fine-over-un...
Ad industry should burn in the fires of hell.
Similar double-selling of television ads take place as well. A network ad may run in the network feed and will appear in the network affidavit logs as having run. Local affiliates supercede network feeds all the time and in some of those cases they do so during a network ad pod and run station-sold ads. Consumer sees only one of the TV ads but both get reported as run.
Fraud in advertising isn't something new or isolated to the online medium.
Doesn't mean there isn't fraud but someone can't really make up circulation numbers out of whole cloth.
All I'm saying is that the same logic holds for websites and that tracking people is a needlessly paranoid and harmful solution to the problem when it can be solved with trust, contracts and auditing.
I actually agree with you. And large businesses in particular are both audited and do internal audits all the time. It's not that they and their employees are all untrustworthy but audits can both catch mistakes and send a signal that people are watching.
There are probably other mechanisms to do fraud detection. But, as your comment suggests, they may be more heavyweight and therefore might exclude most smaller sites.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dFgfQTo4DRZG5t8Ap/can-ads-be...
What the ad industry refers to as "fraud detection" is just abuse of a monitoring system they didn't have access to in print (pay per view/click) - print ads were still deemed effective even without assurance of per-individual revenue. There's no reason electronic ads couldn't've been treated the same - the only difference is advertisers have been allowed to develop surveillance to gain granular revenue insights (and anything abusing that system of surveillance is labelled "fraud")
Ad fraud is only legitimately "fraud" if you accept the pervasive surveillance it's "defrauding" is legitimate to begin with.
Also...
> the circulation is not a secret
Isn't it? Like yes, there's a published figure, but is it verifiable?
If we're discussing potential for "fraud" here, I don't really see how there's any difference between online and print circulation.
For online "circulation", there are three choices: the two given above, plus the possibility that the "actual numbers" (e.g. generated from server logs) do not reflect what they appear to (ie. bot visits). This is "problem" that tracking seeks to fix, by avoiding a "circulation data source" (page visits) that isn't (and cannot be) reliable.
1. the current incentive where individual brands can defraud ad exchanges' pay-per-x systems. Without pay-per-x this incentive disappears.
2. publishers defrauding advertisers. This has similar cost & risk ratios online as either misreporting numbers or bulk-buying papers does in real life. There's also very little tangible difference between the ability of authorities or legal agents to enforce honest reporting of numbers online and in print. The two scenarios are eminently comparable.
Ultimately, removing pay-per-x brings online ads and the ability to defraud advertisers down to a level of equivalence with print.
Even in cases where the GDPR allows data collection for one purpose, that does not mean you can apply your collected data or analysis for a different purpose.
1. Collect data for DOS-prevention purposes.
2. Analyze it afterwards in aggregate for advertising purposes.
Except you can't do #2 without turning #1 into "collect data for DOS-prevention and advertising purposes", which goes beyond your legitimate interest in collecting the data.
I agree that #2 should be allowed if you'd do #1 anyway, but this isn't how the GDPR works.
Well big surprise: They don't perform as well. Don't you think there is a reason the ad industry went in the direction it did?
The companies who make the real money out of ads are ad tech vendors, with publishers often picking up the scraps
It’s not suprising that people who’ve worked in personalised ads often promote them as the only way to fund the internet
I deliberately made my comment more generic, this isn't just about ads.
Any senior manager worth his or her salt knows that staying on the right side of the law is significantly more important than supporting any dubious "product improvement" which is on the wrong side of the law.
https://twitter.com/garjoh_canuck/status/1318989360407236609 summarizes the studies on this, and this comment [1] gives additional context.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dFgfQTo4DRZG5t8Ap/can-ads-be...
Looking how the data was collected in the studies and where it comes from then Google, FB and other adtech vendors feature strongly (and they can't be considered neutral sources)
In the ad market there are three participants - advertiser, publishers, ad networks.
The last group keep telling us we need them for a health internet, while being completely opaque but making billions creaming off their cut of advertising revenue (there don't seem to be any reliable figures on how much they actually take but an old Guardian study found that sometimes they were getting less than 10% of the revenue the advertiser actually spent - Guardian have brought ad sales in house since)
Alternatives such as category based advertising are often not discussed other than to say 'if personal ads go then the spend is likely to be re-directed towards category based ads'
Even Google while claiming personalised ads are better seems to rely on category based ads for the revenue from search ads (see the CMA report)
IME working alongside various publishers it's often that case that directly sold category based ads are way more profitable for the publishers
Given thread like https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1582434737813348352 (and others) I'm deeply skeptical of claims ad tech companies make
For example, dotapicker.com (which allows you to see counter-pick viability in Dota 2) runs ads but they're either ads of web-based video games that shows a lot of skin and have very vague wording to skirt Google Ads guidelines (about a quarter of the time), or random product and services related to my overall browsing history, eg. Amazon/Etsy/Ebay/etc or B2B services like Monday.com.
Contextual ads definitely work where they can, which is why google.com ads are all contextual to your search, but it expands available ad real-estate to run targeted ads in places that otherwise would get no clicks.
Almost everything we currently decide when you visit a page, the only real concession is that it's scoped to the current page, rather than every page that we know you've visited.
I'm honestly not convinced our current idea of targeted ads actually works. Continually showing me links to a product I bought someone for Christmas a month ago isn't remotely clever, despite being precisely targeted. "People shopping for guitars on Saturdays are more likely to convert to sales, than people shopping while they should be working" does not require storing PII, and is (hypothetically) more useful than "If you bought a guitar last week, surely you're more likely to buy a guitar this week".
It seems like what you posit is only a mystery if we take it on faith that targeting works. Once that faith is lost, you can also approach it from the angle that if showing them something we think they want is just as effective as something we know they don't want, you're actually proving that "what we think they want" isn't working either.
I mean, given "we know you've bought a vacuum cleaner" and "we think you'd like a kettle" - if ads for either are equally effective, either there's a lot more people collecting vacuums than either of us would have expected - or we're entirely wrong about the kettle. And it seems to me that our blind faith in targeted advertising leads us to wonder why people want so many vacuums.
But how do we explain how there are also advertisers like Amazon who do know that you just bought a vacuum from them and still show you more ads for it? Since Amazon is in a position to run principled A/B tests on whether showing these ads leads to sales that otherwise wouldn't have happened, and they are the kind of organization I'd expect to get this right, this part I am willing to accept without external evidence. It's probably that the likelihood of additional purchases of the same item, for yourself or others, is high enough, combined with that the cost of advertising to you is low enough.
People sending stuff they brought back and buying something else exist, and also people buying for their friends. But if you had an actually good prediction of their behavior, you wouldn't need to proxy it by "brought a vacuum recently".
Yet, companies insist that failure is a feature, and that their local maximum is the best possible world. And will keep harming advertisers, viewers and society to keep their position at that peak.
Removing PII will hopefully hurt the greedy ad serving companies most. Though I am scared they will find workarounds.
Our niche is office design content and we sell advertising primarily to office furniture manufacturers. The ads are hosted by us and are sold directly.
But this is also not a model that can support a very large fraction of the existing web. Most sites aren't built from the ground up to have this kind of highly commercial tie-in.
*edit: that said there is a local news website in my city that has local ads for local services and businesses.
Our specific case is weird in that contract furniture is mostly purchased through dealers so tracking sales isn’t as straightforward.
What they are chosen based on is much closer to the reader than the content. Publishers have collected reader demographics for decades. Ads have been targeted at audiences as long as there have been ads. What has changed is the expected reach, recency, and individualization of the targeting information. But they have never targeted based on the content, except as a proxy for audience for immature publications/media.
Someone reading a print article is probably a much stronger signal that they are interested in things related to the article or the topic of the publication than is someone reading an article on a website.
If some random site runs an article about, say, a meteor shower you probably can't infer that the reader has more than a passing interest in astronomy. Even of a site that is focused on astronomy runs such an article they are still likely to get a lot of casual readers, such as people who heard on the news about an upcoming meteor shower and Googled to find more information.
If on the other hand Sky & Telescope runs an article about a meteor shower in their printed magazine it is probably a safe bet that most people reading that have a fairly serious interest in astronomy.
If I were trying to sell astronomical equipment I'd probably be willing to pay a lot more to run an ad in Sky & Telescope than I'd pay to run the same ad on a "free but with ads" astronomy website and I'd pay even less to run it on some non-astronomy site that happens to be running an astronomy article.
I think this largely invalidates most of the "it worked for print so it will work on the web" arguments I've seen except maybe for websites with well enforced paywalls.