Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Some of the world’s biggest brands were ripped off by a digital fraud scheme that used a network of websites connected to US advertising industry insiders to steal what experts say could be millions of dollars, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. Approximately 40 websites used special code that triggered an avalanche of fraudulent views…
About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027. The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how…
Credit: Illustration by Nicholas Little When BuzzFeed announced with fanfare last week that it is coming out with two bold new ad products that, in part, translate TV ads to GIFs for social and mobile, Jarrod Dicker, VP of commercial product and innovation at The Washington Post, couldn’t resist taking the bait. “The @washingtonpost RED…
“You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” And so our resident genius, our Dr. Jekyll, explosively completed his transformation into Mr. Hyde. He declared this in front of the product design team, developers, management, and pre-launch customers. One…
It was all going to be so amazing. It all sounded so great. Advertising was going to be amazing.People weren’t going to just look at online ads, they were going to interact with them. People were going to go online and “join the conversation” about our brands and start their own conversations. And these conversations…
“It’s not hard to find great women in engineering,” Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of parenting technology company Winnie, told Refinery29. “Winnie has attracted a majority-female engineering team including our head of engineering who is also a woman. It turns out when you build an inclusive environment that’s supportive of women, and parents, and has…
One person’s page speed is another person’s monetization problem. Six publishing sources, requesting anonymity out of fear of angering Google, said their ads load slower than their content on AMP, and that is part of the reason why they make less money per pageview from AMP than they do from their own websites. In one…
Many publishers believe consumers would pay more attention to online ads if they were just better. Now Fusion Media Group is acting on that sentiment: It is trying out a new system that rewards advertisers that make the most engaging ads by giving them bonus impressions. The Univision-owned digital media company, whose 12 sites include…
Gee thanks, Gus. Gus isn’t a real person, but it’s the pseudonym Senator Al Franken assigned to the Equifax Inc. employee who holds a lot of the blame for the theft of 145.5 million Americans’ personal data. Former Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith told Franken and other senators Wednesday that Equifax was breached largely because of…
The big five agency holding companies are so deeply mired in surcommissions and client distrust that media agencies as a whole face an existential crisis. Last week saw the great and the good of the advertising world trundle to New York City for Advertising Week – four days of talks, events, awards and general navel-gazing….