Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and…
Over the years advances in AI have enhanced our products, benefiting the people who use them, web content creators, and the overall web ecosystem. The rapid growth and development of generative AI tools is helping web publishers connect with their audiences more easily and creatively than ever before. We’re committed to developing AI responsibly, guided…
Despite the industry’s efforts, low-quality supply continues to be a regular component of the programmatic supply chain, according to July’s Jounce Media report, which found that top supply-side platforms (SSPs) often sell as much inventory from premium publishers as sub-premium. Inventory classified as sub-premium includes made-for-advertising sites, non-viewable ad placement, and inventory that could only…
New York is prohibiting advertisers from geofencing health care facilities, according to a new provision in the state budget passed in May. As a result, it’s becoming harder for advertisers, who want to use location or health care data, to maintain performance while still abiding by the law. Geofencing is a technology that lets companies…
Content owners are wising up to their work being freely used by Big Tech to build new AI tools. Bots like Common Crawl are scraping and storing billions of pages of content for AI training. With less incentive to share online freely, the web could become a series of paywalled gardens. AI is undermining the…
In early July, Meta introduced Threads, a text-posting social-media application that was clearly designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk. Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of Threads, recently explained that the goal of the service is “to create a public square for communities on…
One month after the publication of a hotly contested report on the transparency of media buys on YouTube, advertisers are probing the industry’s largest seller of online ad space for better answers. The controversy sprang from a report by research firm Adalytics which claimed that marketers buying ad space on YouTube are potentially vulnerable to…
The European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation on Tuesday into whether Google has abused its market position by favoring its own online display advertising technology. Why it matters: The probe will target parts of Google’s massive $147 billion annual ads business that have never been investigated formally by regulators, including ways its advertising practices…
Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant’s online-ad business. Google’s YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through…
Advertising industry figures are demanding significant refunds from YouTube following new research that suggests millions of adverts on the video platform are hidden away from users in ways that breach the Google-owned group’s policies. Adalytics, a digital ads analysis group, has conducted research into YouTube’s “TrueView” system, through which the platform’s more than 2bn users…