Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend

I don't think there is a coordinated takedown; after all, ranting about it on HN wouldn't affect anything if advertising actually worked as designed and had the intended effect.

The problem is that first off, people rightfully dislike advertising so it's expected for them to rant about it, second, regulation is being worked on (whether the GDPR, CCPA, or similar) that would thwart targeted advertising, so advertising is now also facing pressure from the government and not just from people ranting about it, and third, these articles talk about brands themselves having doubts about the effectiveness of their advertising efforts and the media rightfully reports on it.

Ranting about ads by itself won't change much, but in this case it seems some advertisers themselves are having doubts as to how effective it really is and both the media and HN is reacting to that.

> Google derives 80% of its revenue from ads, Facebook 99%. Imagine these giants coming down if it turns out that online ads aren't effective?

Just because Google and Facebook are able to make a profit off their ads doesn't mean that their ads are actually good value and not overpriced, nor that the people in charge of assessing the ROI of these ads are incentivized to look into it (which is the point I'm arguing in the thread you linked). You can very well agree that online ads are effective but still aren't worth what they are currently priced at.

I have noticed the same thing over the last four or five months. I’ve been curious if a voting ring has sprung up on HN or maybe a COVID impacted demographic suddenly has a lot of time to patrol the site, or if it’s something else. It would be really interesting to have some anonymized voting data to analyze and see how downvotes map to accounts, geography, and economic trends over time. Though voting data must be relatively huge compared to content and I bet it gets discarded after items close to replies.

Yeah, not surprised at all here. What is surprising is that they actually found this out and acknowledged it.

Used to work in the performance marketing team for one of the top 10 brands as an analyst/data scientist, and the reality is that the company politics and individuals' career ambitions top the science. Most of the time the work that gets visibility is spent on "creating stories around data for the leadership": marketers do not understand at all the data they are fed to by the advertising platforms. Also, running controlled A/B studies tended to show between 0 and 10% (this was rare, closer to 0% more common) causal impact on campaings making none of the marketing campaigns profitable in the sense that was used for performance evaluation.

There is one key visicious loop keeping the game going:

1. The marketers want to show great numbers back to the leadership (internal storytelling). Their employment/bonuses depend on the number reported by the ad platform.

2. The ad platforms want more of your ad spend which can be achieved by showing better ROI in their platform.

3. Both the marketers and the ad platforms want to show as good numbers as possible, leading to a situation that nobody is incentiviced to measure true performance / correctly measuring performance.

None of the A/B tests nor analyses about ad fraud went beyond the marketing director. One cool case was analyzing Google's DoubleClick ad logs for a bunch of campaigns that showed there were few cookies that received a significant % portion of the total ad spend - meaning that few "insividuals" received tens or hundreds of thousands of ad impressions.

Nobody cared and this still goes on. It is such a toxic environment to work in I ended up changing career a bit.

You misunderstand what advertisers are trying to achieve. It's about Brand Awareness. They just want their brand out there and seen. Even click-throughs aren't as important as they once were. Coca-Cola still advertise when they probably don't need to.

The issue is, most online ads don't work EXCEPT for G and FB. That's why they're so dominant.

The average third-party ad networks are junk, rife with fraud (ads that are never actually seen or clicked by a human), poor targeting, poor measurement, limited brand safety, and opaque billing.

First-party ad tech provides much better control over these factors and can generally be offered cheaper because they can more effectively allocate their clients' budgets. In what other industries are the superior products cheaper than the junk? (not rhetorical - I'm curious if this exists in other industries)

G and FB are the biggest first-party ad sellers, given that their total addressable audience covers most of the free world, with Amazon rapidly gaining ground. TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat are building clones of G/FB's ad tech by poaching a lot of their engineers (karma for G/FB cloning their consumer products...) and are also showing strong growth as first-party sellers.

If you're a website/app that monetizes through a third-party network (including Google Adsense and Facebook Audience Network), you're going to see your revenues plummet in the coming months.