Adalytics

It's in the original report, which several other people have already linked to: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads There's a detailed methodology section. I haven't verified their results, but they report finding things like muted, autoplaying ads even on big-name sites like the New York Times. A few key quotes: "For one major infrastructure brand approximately 73% of their TrueView skippable in-stream budget was spent on Google Video Partner sites or apps whose ad delivery does not appear to be consistent with the TrueView or in-stream requirements." "A major consumer goods brand had 75% of their TrueView budget delivered against Google Video Partner (GVP) sites or apps. 56% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 19% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against ineligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps[...]" "A Fortune 500 brand had approximately 57% of their total TrueView in-stream ad budget served on GVP sites and apps. 35% of their total TrueView budget was spent against websites which served TrueView ads in muted or non-in-stream video players [...] 8% of their TrueView skippable in-stream ad budget delivered against in-eligible mobile apps which are not video streaming apps." I'm no marketing expert, but 43-73% of one's ad budget basically being thrown away seems like not great results.

Here is the report from Adalytics which was confirmed by Fairplay https://adalytics.io/blog/are-youtube-ads-coppa-compliant

This seems to just be a read-aloud summary of https://checkmyads.org/branded/googles-epic-multi-billion-dollar-ad-sc… with some rants in-between. Discussed 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36528077 Original report: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

> "significant quantities", "many different brands", "appear to have been served", "many ads were served", "Often"...you can keep reading as long as you like, and will not find a single objective number or percentage I’m a bit confused. The Adalytics report definitely defines numbers and percentages of the samples they looked at. Obviously only Google will have the authoritative final numbers, but they are also the ones most incentivized to keep them as opaque as possible. I admit I’m not very familiar with the ad business, and know that a fraud is rampant, but there is a difference between a rampant 5-10% fraud to 50–60%. The first few paragraph list a lot of percentages from that report Original report: https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

The original source article seems to be https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

Both this and the previous article https://adalytics.io/blog/tens-of-thousands-of-news-articles-are-label… are more interesting than the domain and page design would imply. They seem to be developing a browser extension for "personal ad analytics."

I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment. >Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments? Absolutely. That's the dirty secret at the heart of online advertising. The advertisers are unsophisticated, so there is a staggering amount of fraud taking place. Advertisers have no way / have no interest in checking which sites end up serving their ads, so you get situations where large firms are bankrolling extremist sites [1] (Nandini Jammi does a lot of work to expose how this works) Because advertising networks are either sketchy or cartelized (search for "project Jedi Blue"), middlemen also skim ~50% of ad spend before it reaches publishers.[2] But, ads do work. They just work on the portion of the population that is not savvy enough to use adblockers, or wealthy enough to pay for ad-free "Premium". And it is a dwindling group. [1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-steve-bannon-has-exploited-goog… [2] (esp ISBA study showing how 15% of every dollar is unattributable) [2] https://adalytics.io/blog/adtech-supply-fees

Ok, I found some answers. The original research is linked in the OP: https://adalytics.io/blog/sanctioned-ad-tech-user-data -- this is much more informative than the ProPublica writeup. It includes a technical explanation of what's going on. Basically, the accusation is that a sanctioned Russian company is listed as an advertiser ("Demand Side Platform") on Google's real-time bidding platform for ads. This means they get a blob of data for each impression that there is a bid on (this is "the bidstream data"): > These can include: The URL, website, or app the consumer is on, Information about the consumer’s device, The consumer’s geo-location, The consumer’s IP address, Various demographic or behavioral attributes about the consumer (as supplied by the ad exchange or third party data brokers), such as gender, age range, or job occupation These user IDs are anonymized but there's machinery to link the bid data to a cookie that the advertiser already has in their own system ("cookie matching"). They provide some evidence that even though RuTarget was OFAC sanctioned in April, Google may still be providing them the bidstream (and therefore presumably is selling services to an OFAC-sanctioned entity). This would be quite surprising if so, since a company like Google surely has processes to monitor the OFAC watchlist and automatically deactivate companies that are sanctioned. My summary here is that the ProPublica article is incomplete and that makes it a bit misleading;…