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We're going to have to come to terms with the fact almost every piece of ad tech "safety" code is a joke & they're all just cancerous chunks of code bloating sites & extracting capital from buyers & sellers while using the blackbox of ad tech as an excuse when they don't work. kfranasz/1501587253000392706On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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Almost everything these scripts do is easily achievable using well-maintained open source software and they exploit the fact that buyers don't trust publishers to step into the middle and shake down both sides...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood -2 🙁
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I've been in multiple calls where a "verification" company would say something like "we're real sorry your metrics are bad on our system, despite your internal metrics indicating otherwise, but pay us $300/mo & drop our script on the page & the numbers will get better for you"...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood -2 🙁
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These companies are running a protection racket only the fact that no one understands what's going on in ad tech means they don't actually have to do the work of protecting anyone.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood -1 🙁
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I spoke about this (in 2016!) I ended up meeting with a VP from the company I did not name in the piece and he asked "hey, in that article, were you talking about us?" and when I confirmed I was, his response was: "Yup, that sure sounds like us" poynter.org/tech-tools/2016/ad-tech-is-broken-heres-how-newsrooms-can-fix-it/Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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See their problem isn't that these things are difficult to measure, it's that their methodology that usually operates within iFrames doesn't work when it has to crawl out of the iFrame in any post-IE browser so they have to push to have their glitchy code on your site...Permalink On twitter.com
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But often, they do not, and they're promising the buyers that their code works universally! Only it doesn't. So they're going to bs their way around having functional code whenever possible and now they have no incentive to have code that actually works.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood -1 🙁
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The end result being that even if they do manage a successful shakedown that results in their code being on your site, it doesn't actually *have* to work. They have no incentives to make it work. So it usually doesn't.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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The 1 big exception here is safety code working only on behalf of publishers, scripts that have to intervene against iFrames & bad JS coming out of ads in order to keep basic site functionality going. Of course these very products only make buyer safety tools less likely to work.Permalink On twitter.com
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If every single company in the "media quality" category of vendors imploded tomorrow there would be no impact on functioning of the ad tech ecosystem other than maybe some major news sites would stop getting ads auto-blocked by these vendors on breaking news stories.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood 0