Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy. In 1969, a woman named Barbara James walked into a neighborhood legal services office in New York City in search of help to fight the city’s home visit policy. Her case…
Ad fraud will cost marketers $84 billion this year – 22% of all online ad spend. This figure is expected to soar to $170 billion in five years’ time in 2028, according to a new in-depth study from Juniper Research. Why we care. Ad fraud could be costing your brand money, hurting campaign results, leaving…
Pluralistic: The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline (29 Sept 2023) Today’s links The surveillance advertising to financial fraud pipeline: Finding suckers is the one thing ad-targeting is good at. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current…
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…