Facebook Limits Some Ad Targeting; People Still Won't Be Happy

from the no-one-will-ever-be-happy-with-facebook dept

I still think that the power of targeted advertising is somewhat overblown (and that neither Google nor Facebook want to admit that). Relatedly, I think that bad targeted advertising creeps people out way too much, and that's a problem. However, given all that, Facebook's newly announced plans to remove certain forms of targeting from its targeted advertising program seems kind of weird.

Starting January 19, 2022 we will remove Detailed Targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation. Examples include:

• Health causes (e.g., “Lung cancer awareness”, “World Diabetes Day”, “Chemotherapy”)
• Sexual orientation (e.g., “same-sex marriage” and “LGBT culture”)
• Religious practices and groups (e.g., “Catholic Church” and “Jewish holidays”)
• Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures

It is important to note that the interest targeting options we are removing are not based on people’s physical characteristics or personal attributes, but instead on things like people’s interactions with content on our platform. However, we’ve heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups. We routinely review, update and remove targeting options to simplify our ads system, provide more value for advertisers and people, and reduce the potential for abuse.

While I can clearly see ways in which that kind of ad targeting could be abused, it also seems somewhat arbitrary that these limits are now there. And, you can clearly see many reasons why people should be allowed to target advertising on these kinds of topics. For example, advertising religious items to people practicing those religions seems perfectly reasonable.

We discussed this a bit before as it relates to a proposed bill to remove Section 230 from targeted advertising on some of these topics: there often are times when it's useful to be able to target to such narrow groups. And yes, even if it can sometimes be abused, is that worth completely tossing out the good created by finding the appropriate audience?

And, of course, the simple fact is that no one will ever be happy with Facebook's decisions. As it notes in the announcement itself, advertisers don't like this move, and Facebook critics will claim it doesn't go nearly far enough. This just seems like a semi-arbitrary way of Facebook to dip its toes in the water of saying "we're going to limit this stuff that you insist we only do because of our nefarious intent" and it's not going to stop anyone from insisting Facebook still has nefarious intent.

Filed Under: ad targeting, ads, health causes, online ads, political beliefs, religious practices, sexual orientation, social media
Companies: facebook

How The Third Party Cookie Crumbles: Tracking And Privacy Online Get A Rethink

from the important,-but-not-as-important dept

Google made some news Wednesday by noting that once it stops using 3rd party cookies to track people, it isn't planning to replace such tracking with some other (perhaps more devious) method. This news is being met cynically (not surprisingly), with people suggesting that Google has plenty of 1st party data, and really just doesn't need 3rd party cookie data any more. Or, alternatively, some are noting (perhaps accurately) that since Google has a ton of 1st party data -- more than just about anyone else -- this could actually serve to lock in Google's position and diminish the alternatives from smaller advertising firms who rely on 3rd party cookies to bootstrap enough information to better target ads. Both claims might be accurate. Indeed, in the "no good deed goes unpunished" category, the UK has already been investigating Google's plans to drop 3rd party cookies on the grounds that it's anti-competitive. This is at the same time that others have argued that 3rd party cookies may also violate some privacy laws.

And, yes, it's possible that it can be both good for privacy and anti-competitive, which raises all sorts of interrelated issues.

In theory cookies should have been very pro-privacy. After all, they're putting data on end user computers where they have control over them. Users can delete those cookies or block them from being placed. In theory. The reality, though, is that deleting or blocking cookies takes a lot of effort, and while there are some services that help you out, they're not always great. In an ideal world, we would have built tools that made it clearer to end users what information cookies were tracking, and what was being done with that information -- as well as consumer-friendly tools to adjust things. But that's not the world we ended up in. Instead, we ended up in a world where the hamfisted use of 3rd party cookies is generally just kinda creepy. In the past, I've referred to it as the uncanny valley of advertising: where the advertising is not so well targeted as to be useful, but just targeted enough to be creepy and annoying by reminding you that you're being tracked.

The actual death knell for 3rd party cookies happened a while back. Firefox and Safari phased out 3rd party cookies a long time ago, and Google announced plans to do the same a year ago, with an actual target date for implementation a year from now. Today's news was more about what happens next, with Google promising not to use some sneaky method to basically replace cookies with something even worse. There is a concerted effort by some to track you through a "hashed email address". This is really creepy and kinda sketchy.

As a side note, a few years back, we were approached by a company doing this. They basically asked us to hand over a hashed set of emails we had collected. We looked over the details, and highlighted that they wanted us to use their hash, meaning that they could easily reverse the hash and figure out the emails. We explained that they must be mistaken, because that's really not all that different from just handing over emails, which would be a violation of our own privacy policy. We were told that, no, the whole idea was everyone had to use the same hash, and it was fine because the email addresses were hashed (ignoring the point we made about that being meaningless if everyone is using the same hash). We rejected this deal, even though they were actually offering decent money. I do sometimes wonder how many other publishers just coughed up everyone's emails, though.

So, Google's latest point is that it's not going to use some other unique identifier, and recognizes that the hashed email based-identifier is a bad idea:

We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.

Instead, Google is pushing for a different kind of solution -- what it has referred to for a while now as a "Privacy Sandbox." The idea is not to track individuals but rather to dump you into a "cohort" of similar users, thereby not needing unique identifiers, just slightly more general ones. Google has taken to calling this cohort setup "Federated Learning of Cohorts", or FLoC, which it recently declared to be 95% as good at targeting ads, but in a less creepy way.

In many ways, this is obviously better than the use of full-on individual tracking via 3rd party cookies (or hashed emails). It's sort of a step away from individual targeting and at least a very slight movement back towards contextual advertising, which is something I've argued both Google and Facebook should do. But it's still not ideal. You still have the concerns about how much data Google has about you, and you still have the concerns about whether or not this locks in Google's position. Those don't go away with this move.

And, of course, there's the other framework to think about this: the never-ending threat of new privacy laws. So much of the focus on privacy legislation is (stupidly) about fighting the last battles, and that's why things like the GDPR and California's CCPA focused on useless and counterproductive cookie notifications. In some ways, this could be seen as a step towards getting ahead of that coming meteor, sidestepping it by saying "okay, okay, there are no more third party cookies."

In the end, you can't argue that this is a great solution or a terrible one. It is... just a change. A change that helps one aspect of how our current online privacy paradigm works, but which might cause other problems. It's good in that it's a further step towards the end of 3rd party cookies, which have been abused in creepy ways for too long. But it doesn't really fix overall privacy issues, and could still help lock Google into a position of dominance.

Filed Under: ads, cookies, online ads, privacy, third party cookies
Companies: google

How To Think About Online Ads And Section 230

from the oversimplification-avoidance dept

There's been a lot of consternation about online ads, sometimes even for good reason. The problem is that not all of the criticism is sound or well-directed. Worse, the antipathy towards ad tech, regardless of whether it is well-founded or not, is coalescing into yet more unwise, and undeserved, attacks on Section 230 and other expressive discretion the First Amendment protects. If these attacks are ultimately successful none of the problems currently lamented will be solved, but they will create lots of new ones.

As always, effectively addressing actual policy challenges first requires a better understanding of what these challenges are. The reality is that there are at least three separate issues that are raised by online ads: those related to ad content itself, those related to audience targeting, and those related to audience tracking. They all require their own policy responses—and, as it happens, none of those policy responses call for doing anything to change Section 230. In fact, to the extent that Section 230 is even relevant, the best policy response will always require keeping it intact.

With regard to ad content, Section 230 applies, and should apply, to the platforms that run advertiser-supplied ads for the same reasons it applies, and should apply, to the platforms hosting the other sorts of content created by users. After all, ad content is, in essence, just another form of user generated content (in fact, sometimes it's exactly like other forms of user content). And, as such, the principles behind having Section 230 apply to platforms hosting user-generated content in general also apply – and need to apply – here.

For one thing, as with ordinary user-generated content, platforms are not going to be able to police all the ad content that may run on their site. One important benefit of online advertising versus offline is that it enables far more entities to advertise to far larger audiences than they would be able to afford in the offline space. Online ads may therefore sometimes be cheesy, low-budget affairs, but it's ultimately good for the consumer if it's not just large, well-resourced, corporate entities who get to compete for public attention. We should be wary of implementing any policy that might choke off this commercial diversity.

Of course, the flip side to making it possible for many more actors to supply many more ads is that the supply of online ads is nearly infinite, and thus the volume is simply too great for platforms to be able to scrutinize all of them (or even most of them). Furthermore, even in cases where platforms might be able to examine an ad, it is still unlikely to have the expertise to review it for all possible legal issues that might arise in every jurisdiction where the ad may appear. Section 230 exists in large part to alleviate these impossible content policing burdens to make it possible for platforms to facilitate the appearance of any content at all.

Nevertheless, Section 230 also exists to make it possible for platforms to try to police content anyway, to the extent that they can, by making it clear that they can't be held liable for any of those moderation efforts. And that's important if we want to encourage them to help eliminate ads of poor quality. We want platforms to be able to do the best they can to get rid of dubious ads, and that means we need to make it legally safe for them to try.

The more we think they should take these steps, the more we need policy to ensure that it's possible for platforms to respond to this market expectation. And that means we need to hold onto Section 230 because it is what affords them this practical ability.

What's more, Section 230 affords platforms all this critical protection regardless of whether they profit from carrying content or not. The statute does not condition its protection on whether a platform facilitates content in exchange for money, nor is there any sort of constitutional obligation for a platform to provide its services on a charitable basis in order to benefit from the editorial discretion the First Amendment grants it. Sure, some platforms do pointedly host user content for free, but every platform needs to have some way of keeping the lights on and servers running. And if the most effective way to keep their services free for some users to post their content is to charge others for theirs, it is an absolutely constitutionally permissible decision for a platform to make.

In fact, it may even be good policy to encourage as well, as it keeps services available for users who can't afford to pay for access. Charging some users to facilitate their content doesn't inherently make the platform complicit in the ad content's creation, or otherwise responsible for imbuing it with whatever quality is objectionable. Even if that an advertiser has paid for algorithmic display priority, Section 230 should still apply just as it applies to any other algorithmically driven display decision the platform employs.

But on the off-chance that the platform did take an active role in creating that objectionable content, Section 230 has never stood in the way of holding the platform responsible. What Section 230 simply says is that making it possible to post unlawful content is not the same as creating content; for the platform to be liable as an "information content provider," aka a content creator, it had to have done something significantly more to birth its wrongful essence than simply be a vehicle for someone else to express it.

It's even true if the platform allows the advertiser to choose its audience. After all, the content has already been created. Audience targeting is something else entirely, but it's also something we should be wary of impinging upon.

There may, of course, be situations where advertisers try to target certain types of ads (ex: jobs, housing offers) in harmful ways. And when they do it may be appropriate to sanction the advertiser for what may amount to illegally discriminatory behavior. But not every such targeting choice is wrongful; sometimes choosing narrow audiences based on protected status may even be beneficial. But if we change the law to allow platforms be held equally liable with the advertiser for their wrongful targeting choices, we will take away the ability for platforms to offer audience targeting for any reasons, even good ones, by making it legally unsafe in case the advertiser does it for bad ones.

Furthermore, doing so will upend all advertising as we've known it, and in a way that's offensive to the First Amendment. There's a reason that certain things are advertised during prime time, or during sports broadcasts, or on late night tv, just as there's a reason that ads appearing in the New York Times are not necessarily the same ones running in Field & Stream or Ebony magazines. The Internet didn't suddenly make those choices possible; advertisers have always wanted the most bang for their buck, to reach the people most likely to be their ultimate customers as cost effectively as possible. And as a result they have always made choices about where to place their ads based on the demographics those ads likely reach. To now say that it should be illegal to allow advertisers to ever make such choices, simply because they may sometimes make these decisions wrongfully would disrupt decades upon decades of past practice and likely run afoul of the First Amendment, which generally protects the choice of whom to speak to. In fact, it protects it regardless of the medium in question, and there is no principled reason why an online platform should be any less protected than a broadcaster or some sort of printed periodical (especially not the former).

Even if it would be better if advertisers weren't so selective—and it's a fair argument to make, and a fair policy to pursue—it's not an outcome we should use the weight of legal liability to try to force. It won't work, and it impinges on important constitutional freedoms we've come to count on. Rather, if there is any affirmative policy response to ad tech that is warranted it is likely with the third constituent part: audience tracking. But even so, any policy response will still need to be a careful one.

There is nothing new about marketers wanting to fully understand their audiences; they have always tried to track them as well as the technology of the day would allow. What's new is how much better they now can. And the reality is that some of the tracking ability is intrusive and creepy, especially to the degree it happens without the audience being aware of how much of their behavior is being silently learned by strangers. There is room for policy to at minimum encourage, and potentially even require, such systems to be more transparent in how they learn about their audiences, tell others what they've learned, and give those audiences a chance to say no to much of it.

But in considering the right regulatory response there are some important caveats. First, take Section 230 off the table. It has nothing to do with this regulatory problem, apart from enabling platforms that may use ad tech to exist at all. You don't fix ad tech by killing the entire Internet; any regulatory solution is only a solution when it targets the actual problem.

Which leads to the next caution, because the regulatory schemes we've seen attempted so far (GDPR, CCPA, Prop. 24) are, even if well-intentioned, clunky, conflicting, and with plenty of overhead that compromises their effectiveness and imposes their own unintended and chilling costs, including on expression itself (and of more expression than just that of advertisers).

Still, when people complain about online ads this is frequently the area they are complaining about and it is worth focused attention to solve. But it is tricky; given how easy it is for all online activity to leave digital footprints, as well as the many reasons we might want to allow those footprints to be measured and then those measurements to be used (even potentially for advertising), care is required to make sure we don't foreclose the good uses while aiming to suppress the bad. But for the right law, one that recognizes and reasonably reacts to the complexity of this policy challenge, there is an opportunity for a constructive regulatory response to this piece of the online ad tech puzzle. There is no quick fix – and ripping apart the Internet by doing anything to Section 230 is certainly not any kind of fix at all – but if something must be done about online advertising, this is the something that's worth the thoughtful policy attention to try to get right.

Filed Under: advertising, business models, internet, online ads, section 230

If We're Going To Talk About Discrimination In Online Ads, We Need To Talk About Roommates.com

from the deja-vu-all-over-again dept

It has been strange to see people speak about Section 230 and illegal discrimination as if it were somehow a new issue to arise. In fact, one of the seminal court cases that articulated the parameters of Section 230, the Roommates.com case, did so in the context of housing discrimination. It's worth taking a look at what happened in that litigation and how it bears on the current debate.

Roommates.com was (and apparently remains) a specialized platform that does what it says on the tin: allow people to advertise for roommates. Back when the lawsuit began, it allowed people who were posting for roommates to include racial preferences in their ads, and it did so in two ways: (1) through a text box, where people could write anything about the roommate situation they were looking for, and (2) through answers to mandatory questions about roommate preferences.

Roommates.com got sued by the Fair Housing Councils of the San Fernando Valley and San Diego for violating federal (FHA) and state (FEHA) fair housing law for allowing advertisers to express these discriminatory preferences. It pled a Section 230 defense, because the allegedly offending ads were user ads. But, in a notable Ninth Circuit decision, it both won and it lost.

In sum, the court found that Section 230 indeed applied to the user expression supplied through the text box. That expression, for better or worse, was entirely created by the user. If something was wrong with it, it was the user who had made it wrongful and the user, as the information content provider, who could be held responsible—but not, per Section 230, the Roommates.com platform, which was the interactive computer service provider for purposes of the statute and therefore immune from liability for it.

But the mandatory questions were another story. The court was concerned that, if these ads were illegally discriminatory, the platform had been a party to the creation of that illegality by prompting the user to express discriminatory preferences. And so the court found that Section 230 did not provide the platform a defense to any claim predicated on the content elicited by these questions.

Even though it was a split and somewhat messy decision, the Roommates.com case has held up over the years and provided subsequent courts with some guidance for how to figure out when Section 230 should apply. There are still fights around the edges, but figuring out whether it should apply has basically boiled down to determining who imbued the content with its allegedly wrongful quality. If the platform, then it's on the hook as much as the user may be. But its contribution to wrongful content's creation still had to be more substantive than merely offering the user the opportunity to express something illegal.

The fact that Roommate encourages subscribers to provide something in response to the prompt is not enough to make it a "develop[er]" of the information under the common-sense interpretation of the term we adopt today. It is entirely consistent with Roommate's business model to have subscribers disclose as much about themselves and their preferences as they are willing to provide. But Roommate does not tell subscribers what kind of information they should or must include as "Additional Comments," and certainly does not encourage or enhance any discriminatory content created by users. Its simple, generic prompt does not make it a developer of the information posted. [p. 1174].

The reason it is so important to hold onto that distinction is because the Roommates.com litigation has a punchline. The case didn't end there, with that first Ninth Circuit decision. After several more years of litigation there was a another Ninth Circuit decision in the case, this time on the merits of the discrimination claim.

And the claim failed. Per the Ninth Circuit, roommate situations are so intimate that the First Amendment rights of free association must be allowed to prevail and people be able to choose whom they live with by any means they like, even if its xenophobic prejudice.

Because of a roommate's unfettered access to the home, choosing a roommate implicates significant privacy and safety considerations. The home is the center of our private lives. Roommates note our comings and goings, observe whom we bring back at night, hear what songs we sing in the shower, see us in various stages of undress and learn intimate details most of us prefer to keep private. Roommates also have access to our physical belongings and to our person. As the Supreme Court recognized, "[w]e are at our most vulnerable when we are asleep because we cannot monitor our own safety or the security of our belongings." Minnesota v. Olson, 495 U.S. 91, 99, 110 S.Ct. 1684, 109 L.Ed.2d 85 (1990). Taking on a roommate means giving him full access to the space where we are most vulnerable. [p. 1221]

[…].

Government regulation of an individual's ability to pick a roommate thus intrudes into the home, which "is entitled to special protection as the center of the private lives of our people." Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 99, 119 S.Ct. 469, 142 L.Ed.2d 373 (1998) (Kennedy, J., concurring). "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home." Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 562, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003). Holding that the FHA applies inside a home or apartment would allow the government to restrict our ability to choose roommates compatible with our lifestyles. This would be a serious invasion of privacy, autonomy and security. [id.].

[…].

Because precluding individuals from selecting roommates based on their sex, sexual orientation and familial status raises substantial constitutional concerns, we interpret the FHA and FEHA as not applying to the sharing of living units. Therefore, we hold that Roommate's prompting, sorting and publishing of information to facilitate roommate selection is not forbidden by the FHA or FEHA. [p. 1223]

This ruling is important on a few fronts. In terms of substance, it means that any law that itself tries to ban discrimination may itself have constitutional problems. It may be just, proper, and even affirmatively Constitutional to ban it in many or even most contexts. But, as this decision explains, it isn't necessarily so in all contexts, and it risks harm to people and the liberty interests that protect them to ignore this nuance.

Meanwhile, from a Section 230 perspective, the decision meant that a platform got dragged through years and years of expensive litigation only to ultimately be exonerated. It's amazing it even managed to survive, as many platforms needlessly put through the litigation grinder don't. And that's a big reason why we have Section 230, because we want to make sure platforms can't get bled dry before being found not liable. It is not ultimate liability that can crush them; it's the litigation itself that can tear them to pieces and force them to shut down or at least severely restrict even lawful content.

Section 230 is designed to avoid these outcomes, and it's important that we not let our distaste, however justified, for some of the content internet users may create prompt us to make the platforms they use vulnerable to such ruin. Not if we want to make sure internet services can still remain available to facilitate the content that we prefer they carry instead.

Filed Under: civil rights, discrimination, online ads, section 230
Companies: roommates

Under Investigation For Antitrust Abuse, Trump DOJ Rubber Stamps Major Ad Industry Consolidation

from the bigger-must-be-better dept

While the Trump administration and its allies (like Josh Hawley) like to talk a lot about monopolization in "big tech," they couldn't actually care less about monopolies or their impact on competition. For example while Hawley and the Trump FCC/DOJ have made an endless stink about the power of "big tech," that's largely for performative political reasons, namely to perpetuate the utterly false claim that Conservatives are being "censored," to bully tech giants away from encryption, or to frighten them away from finally doing something about the (profitable) bigotry and disinformation problems that plague their networks.

Oddly, this performative, sometimes vindictive nonsense is often conflated with actually caring about monopoly power and reforming antitrust. You only need to look at the DOJ and FCC's mindless rubber stamping of every fleeting whim of the US telecom industry, one of the most heavily monopolized (and widely despised) sectors in technology. While T-Mobile was getting the red carpet rolled out for its competition and job killing merger with Sprint, Bill Barr's DOJ was busy hassling small cannabis companies, or filing empty-headed "antitrust" lawsuits against automakers for agreeing to limit emissions.

Studies from the likes of the Antitrust Institute (pdf) have made it very clear: the Trump administration's interest in "antitrust reform" is utterly and completely hollow. During an era when lagging antitrust enforcement needed to be meaningfully improved and reformed, the Trump administration instead began wielding antitrust as a political bludgeon to gain leverage over its enemies and dole out favors to its allies. It's mindless theater and an abuse of the law, yet it's often portrayed as serious adult policy making by many experts and the press.

Despite ongoing whistleblower investigations of Barr's politicization of antitrust, his DOJ is now rubber stamping the merger between native advertising platforms Taboola and Outbrain. EU and UK regulators have been scrutinizing the deal, arguing it will erode competition in the native advertising (read: clickbait) space, resulting in notably worse terms for already struggling publishers who face getting an even smaller share of advertising revenue:

"The Competition and Markets Authority said it has concerns the merger will result in a substantial lessening of competition and that it will investigate further unless the businesses take steps to address them...Many national and local news websites in the UK use one of the two services and the CMA said a “large proportion” of the publishers it contacted as part of its initial investigations were concerned about the potential impact of the deal."

More specifically, UK regulators say the combined companies would enjoy an 80% market share for the clickbait online recommendations market:

"Taboola and Outbrain are the 2 largest providers of content recommendation services to publishers in the UK, with a combined market share of over 80%. They supply very similar services and are each other’s main competitor. In particular, the companies’ internal documents and information received from publishers showed the strong competition between the companies.

If the merger were to go ahead, the CMA is concerned that publishers in the UK will have a reduced choice of supplier for content recommendation services. This could result in a worsening of terms for publishers and a reduction in their share of advertising revenue. A large proportion of the publishers contacted by the CMA were concerned about the impact of the deal if it goes ahead."

Many in the marketing sector have echoed those sentiments, stating the only thing the merger really accomplishes is creating a "gigantic vortex of crap":

In contrast there's been little to no serious scrutiny by the Barr DOJ, which apparently didn't spend too much time thinking about the deal's potential pitfalls:

"The Taboola-Outbrain merger had been proposed by the companies’ executives as way for publishers to monetize digital content outside of Big Tech’s monopolies. But some publishers Adweek has been talking to question how the merged company would be structured and what sort of terms it would offer publishers.

“What will be interesting is what happens to yield?” a publishing source told Adweek. “Will this be an improvement? Will the joined forces allow more yield to flow through to publishers? Or does this actually remove some competition in such a way that yield suffers? I don’t know.”

Now, maybe the Trump DOJ seriously looked at this deal intelligently and greenlit it based on adult policy making (they've yet to explain the approval). But based on what we've seen in the last year or two (like DOJ antitrust boss Delrahim using his personal phone and text message accounts to personally guide T-Mobile to merger approval, something, it should go without saying, antitrust enforcers should not be doing), that's giving them too much credit. It could really be as simple as the fact that Taboola execs told the DOJ this might potentially challenge "big tech," and that was enough for them.

That's the problem when you start abusing legal authority with reckless abandon--you lose any trust or faith in the idea that your decisions are actually being based on the data.

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, doj, monopoly, online ads

New Study Shows That All This Ad Targeting Doesn't Work That Well

from the well-duh dept

Just a couple months ago, I wrote a post saying that for all the focus on "surveillance capitalism," and the claims that Facebook and Google need to suck up more and more data to better target ads, the secretive reality was that all of this ad this ad targeting doesn't really work, and it's mostly a scam pulled on advertisers to get them to pay higher rates for little actual return. And, now, a new study says that publishers, in particular, are seeing basically no extra revenue from heavily targeted ads, but some of the middlemen ad tech companies are making out like bandits. In other words, a lot of this is snake oil arbitrage. The WSJ has summarized the findings:

But in one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers’ revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. The study tracked millions of ad transactions at a large U.S. media company over the course of one week.

That modest gain for publishers stands in contrast to the vastly larger sums advertisers are willing to pay for behaviorally targeted ads. A 2009 study by Howard Beales, a professor at George Washington University School of Business and a former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, found advertisers are willing to pay 2.68 times more for a behaviorally targeted ad than one that wasn’t.

Much of the premium likely is being eaten up by the so-called “ad tech tax,” the middlemen’s fees that eat up 60 cents of every dollar spent on programmatic ads, according to marketing intelligence firm Warc.

As a site that relies on advertising to make money, this is hellishly frustrating. For years we've been pitching non-invasive, non-tracking ad campaigns for Techdirt. Over and over again we tell potential advertisers that people here would be much more open to paying attention to their ads if they promised not to do any tracking at all. And, over and over again companies (even those that initially express interest) decide to throw all their money at the big flashy adtech firms that promise to use "AI" and "machine learning" to better target their ads -- and get little in return for it.

We still hope that sooner or later advertisers realize that they're getting scammed by the ad companies promising miracles in the form of tracking everything, and go back to recognizing that good, old fashioned, brand advertising works well without the need for invasive, intrusive surveillance.

Filed Under: advertising, brand advertising, business models, online ads, targeted advertising
Companies: facebook, google

New 'Perceptual' Ad Blocking Tech Doesn't Win The Ad Blocking War, But It May Put Advertisers On Their Heels... Permanently

from the the-mole-finally-got-whacked dept

We've long documented how there's a growing array of websites that seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to "defeating" ad blocking. Quite often that includes punishing customers for a website's own misdeeds, or using ham-fisted (and frankly often broken) systems that attempt to block the ad blockers. Of course, this tends to obfuscate why these users are using blockers in the first place, whether it's to keep ads from eating their broadband usage allotments, or simply as an attempt to protect themselves from "ads" that are often indistinguishable from malware.

The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security. Here at Techdirt, we long ago decided to let our visitors decide what their ad experience looks like, letting visitors disable ads entirely if that's they're preference (we just, of course, hope they'll try to support us in other ways). Elsewhere though, websites are engaged in what feels like a futile game of Whac-a-Mole that seems increasingly obvious (to some) won't be "winnable."

New developments on the ad block front seem to indicate this game of Whac-a-Mole may soon end up with the mole being -- well -- most decidedly whacked.

Princeton and Stanford researchers say they've developed a new method of blocking advertisements that detects ads the same way human beings do -- by simply looking at things like container sizes, graphical layout, and words like "Sponsored" (usually mandated by regulations or voluntary, cross-industry commitments). Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and his colleagues have published a new paper (pdf) and proof-of-concept code for something they're calling a Perceptual Ad Blocker. Their paper describes the new technology as such:

"Perceptual ad blocking seeks to improve resilience against ad obfuscation and minimize manual effort needed to create ad blockers. We rely on the key insight that ads are legally required to be clearly recognizable by humans. To make the method robust, we deliberately ignore all signals invisible to humans, including URLs and markup. Instead we consider visual and behavioral information. For example, an ad may include the tex "Sponsored" or 'Close Ad" within its boundaries, either directly or when hovered over. We expect perceptual ad blocking to be less prone to an "arms race."

Over at Freedom to Tinker, Narayanan is quick to point out that this new technology isn't "undefeatable" (as some websites quickly suggested), but it does certainly tilt the ad block battlefield in favor of the end user. He notes that the technology was developed in response to Facebook's decision to integrate ads that look like regular posts in the user's news feed, something systems like AdBlock haven't been able to detect (some smaller blockers like uBlock Origin have been able to, but apparently have such a small market share they've yet to get Facebook's attention).

The other ad blocking obstacle that Narayanan's perceptual ad blocker addresses is the growing numbers of websites that believe they've "solved" the problem by blocking users that block ad blockers. In short, it does this by convincing the web browser to effectively lie to any script trying to determine ad blocker use:

"The second prong of an ad blocking strategy is to deal with websites that try to detect (and in turn block) ad blockers. To do this, we introduce the idea of stealth. The only way that a script on a web page can “see” what’s drawn on the screen is to ask the user’s browser to describe it. But ad blocking extensions can control the browser! Not perfectly, but well enough to get the browser to convincingly lie to the web page script about the very existence of the ad blocker. Our proof-of-concept stealthy ad blocker successfully blocked ads and hid its existence on all 50 websites we looked at that are known to deploy anti-adblocking scripts. Finally, we have also investigated ways to detect and block the ad blocking detection scripts themselves. We found that this is feasible but cumbersome; at any rate, it is unnecessary as long as stealthy ad blocking is successful.

The researchers have developed both a standard and Facebook specific Chrome extension that you can try yourself, and they have no problem with identifying these types of integrated ads:

The researchers have yet to enable the actual blocking component of their ad blockers to, they say, "avoid taking sides on the ethics of ad blocking."

Now you'd like to think that should perceptual ad blocking be as effective as they're claiming, websites and advertisers would be forced to do some soul-searching into why users are flocking to ad blockers in the first place. But most of us know many of these websites won't learn a damn thing in this scenario, and may engage in behavior that forces users to somehow interact with the ads if they want the page to load. Narayanan is quick to point out that this -- like ad block blockers already have -- could only drive users away from these websites even faster:

"If publishers are willing to intrude on users’ attention by making them interact with ads, it does seem unlikely that ad blockers can succeed. But that will also drive away many users, and it’s not clear how many publishers would be willing to make that trade off. Sponsored content / native advertising is again a topic where the law has something to say. These need to be identified clearly as sponsored (and for the most part they are). We’ve found that people aren’t good at noticing these disclosures, but browser extensions can be! Ad blockers could take on the role of prominently alerting readers when a link they’re about to click on is in fact sponsored content."

If perceptual ad blockers are half as successful as the researchers claim they can be, many sites and advertisers have two options. One is to finally take serious stock of why ad block use has skyrocketed (and their own culpability for it) and develop more consumer-centric and creative monetization and advertising efforts. The other is to cry more, double down on blaming visitors for their adaptation failures, design systems that break the internet and annoy site visitors even further, or try to use the law to hamstring the use of ad blockers (an uphill climb, and in some places potentially a two-way street).

If stopping ad blockers truly is a fool's errand (and these researchers strongly believe it is), there's really only one choice that makes any real sense.

Filed Under: ad blocking, ads, online ads, perceptual ad blocking

Interactive Advertising Bureau Bars Adblock Plus From Conference, When It Should Be Listening To Them

from the lalala-we-can't-hear-you dept

Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.

One would think that websites and online advertisers would have much to learn from the providers of ad blockers. It seems there is little appetite for education amongst them, however, as we've recently learned that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has flat out barred Adblock Plus from its annual conference.

According to a post on the Adblock Plus blog, the company had bought a ticket for the IAB conference, which takes place in Palm Desert, California at the end of January. The ticket was not cheap: they start at about £1,750 for members, scaling up to £2,600 for non-members. Then, last week, Adblock Plus received an e-mail from the IAB stating: "We are returning your registration fee and cancelling your registration for the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting." That was the entire content of the communication; according to Adblock Plus, there was no reason given for the cancellation.

Adblock Plus employee Mark Addison e-mailed the IAB and asked if "there must be some confusion" as he hadn't asked for a cancellation or refund. All he got was another inscrutable email from the IAB, confirming that his ticket had indeed been cancelled, but offering up no reason for the cancellation.

The reason for the summary refusal to allow Adblock Plus into the conference isn't difficult to surmise, of course. Online advertisers must certainly cast an unfriendly eye towards ad blockers, seeing them as the enemy. And, in online advertising's current iteration, they are. But, as we've stated before, that's because online advertising first made itself an enemy of the public by being annoying, useless, and even a vector for malware. Refusing to let Adblock Plus into the conference equates to online advertisers sticking their fingers in their ears, refusing to listen to what should be a very important voice in the industry.

Adding to how silly this is is the fact that ad blocking is regularly discussed at the conference.

The IAB has previously acknowledged that adblocking is a huge problem for the industry, and the topic of adblocking was discussed at length at last year's annual conference. If a solution is to be found, it will almost certainly require a dialogue between the advertisers and the advertising blockers.

Imagine if, instead of turning a deaf ear towards ad blockers, the IAB instead encouraged a dialogue to find out how to make their advertising more desirable to those using the software. Adblock Plus must have a ton of data that's useful to advertisers, but they won't get it by keeping their little club exclusive.

Filed Under: ad blocking, ads, online ads
Companies: adblock plus, iab

Online Ad Rates Higher On Certain TV Shows Than TV Ad Rates

from the go-simpsons dept

We were just being told by a supposedly respectable media analyst that things like Hulu were anti-American, because it gave away content for "free" and could potentially bring down the entire media business. Yet, it appears that media businesses are learning how to monetize that online content quite well. Bloomberg notes that for shows like The Simpsons and CSI, online ad rates are actually higher than TV ad rates. There are good reasons for this, including the fact that advertisers recognize viewers of shows online are more committed to the shows -- in that they actively chose to seek out and watch that show, as opposed to just having the TV on in the living room while doing something else. Also, people are more willing to watch those ads, in part because they're shorter and they don't have to watch as many to get to the content they want. Now, it is true that the number of viewers still represents a substantial difference and that media companies rely heavily on carriage fees from cable companies and the like. But the idea that ads can't support TV shows online doesn't seem to be based on anything in reality.

Filed Under: csi, online ads, simpsons, tv ads

Online Publishers' Solution To Falling Ad Revenues: Bigger, More Annoying Ads

from the sledgehammer-on-a-thumbtack dept

Things aren't looking good for the online ad market: reduced spending by advertisers combined with the fact that people don't pay a whole lot of attention to banner ads portends doom and gloom. While the first part of that equation might be out of online publishers' control, they're trying to tackle the second part not by recognizing that advertising needs to be engaging or interesting content in order to be satisfying, but rather by clubbing internet users over the head with some new, huge and intrusive banner ad formats. Say hello to the Fixed Panel, which is a huge vertical banner that "scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls", the XXL Box, which is pretty much exactly what it says, and the Pushdown, the biggest of the bunch, which rolls down from the top of the page to get right in the user's face. The trade group behind these new formats says they are "designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web." That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the user's experience of these ads. These ads might grab users' attention through brute force, but will the experience be a positive one? It seems likely that intrusive advertising that gets in users' way will simply make the current situation worse by driving users away from the content. This is a further reflection of just how dead the captive advertising model is. Consumers have plenty of choices about where to get their content online; if a publishers' advertising keeps getting in their way, they'll move on and get content from somewhere else.

Filed Under: ads, online ads