Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
We live in a pretty polarized era. The internet has turned the world into a gigantic family Thanksgiving table, and everyone’s fighting about pretty much everything, always, forever. I know this. And yet I still have to admit I’m surprised by the level of anger and vitriol I’ve seen regarding something that you’d think would…
Ads.txt is showing publishers that domain spoofing remains a big problem for their video ad businesses. In a study being published Dec. 12 by independent consultant Matthew Goldstein, a group of 16 publishers — including The Washington Post, Daily Mail, Turner, The New York Times and USA Today — found that advertisers spent $3.5 million a…
The Financial Times’ fight against domain spoofing is paying off. After catching 25 ad exchanges misrepresenting access to its inventory in September, the business news publisher took its fraud-fighting test a step further by purchasing counterfeit inventory that purported to be the FT’s to see which vendors were still selling fake FT impressions. Over few…
To investigate the level of domain spoofing occurring against its news brands, News UK conducted a programmatic blackout test for two hours in December. The result: 2.9 million bids per hour were made on fake inventory purporting to be News UK’s The Sun and The Times of London newspaper brands. From the results, the publisher…
Photo: AP Rumors Facebook is always secretly recording you have long refused to die, but it turns out Amazon may be the first tech giant to achieve the age-old dream of a total advertising Panopticon. On Friday, Amazon released the new Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit, which is intended to help developers integrate the company’s personal…
Photo: Getty Images A helpless, flailing Google is unable to stop people from running off with hundreds of the free bicycles available at its Mountain View, California headquarters a week, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Google maintains approximately 1,100 “Gbikes” for employee use on its massive campus there, but locals and employees alike…
Behind every bad tweet is a life story in miniature. Let Drew Magary explain. As a professional online person, I have a soft spot in my heart for bad tweets. Sure, I like to chortle at a good tweet from one of the many amateur Mitch Hedbergs plying their trade on social media. But nothing…
2017’s “YouTube Rewind,” the end-of-year advertisement for the biggest trends and hottest creators on the platform, urges people to come together after an awful year. This heartfelt sentiment lasts about thirty seconds before the camera plunges back down to earth, where a rooftop party rages. Here, two blonde men look out at the horizon, squad…
Many of the publishers that spent 2016 and 2017 investing in Facebook products like Instant Articles and news feed videos enter the new year with new perspective on the relationship they have with the world’s largest social platform. For the latest installment of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, we spoke…
Chrome is now the most popular browser across all devices, thanks to Android’s popularity and the rise of Chrome on Windows PCs and Mac computers. As Google continues to dominate our access to the web, information through its search engine, and services like Gmail or YouTube, Chrome is a powerful entry point in the company’s…