Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

exactly how are the buyers supposed to do that? they have no access to any kind of logs from Googs' servers. it's a perfect setup for Googs. there is no trust but verify. at least with the old school systems of buying radio/tv ads, you can get each market to provide you with an air check showing exactly when/where the ad ran. with print, you could just get a copy of the printed thing. when advertisers were sitting around wondering how they could do less for more, Googs says, hold my beer

Big brands don't care. They have massive budgets that they need to spend and are happy to spend them or else they get cut.

The real goal of this post is clear about half way down the page, de-funding disinformation from right-wing sources. My guess is that the group of website that they call out as problematic are actually great for getting ad viewers (older, non-tech savvy, gullible) that don't click skip. I would be less suspicious that this was a submarine article if the sites called out were roughly balanced left-right (by US standards, which are a bit different ;-).

Meh. I read the original report when it was released, and it was a whole lot of nothing.

Their claim was basically – "we found some Google video ad fraud!". Well guess what, Google knows and agrees that there is fraud. So do all the advertisers who pay them. The question is really about how much fraud there is. Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number.

Now the report makes the usual claims – ads run on shady sites, ads viewed by bots, ads muted or obscured, ads unskippable and against policy etc. When you read through and try to find actual numbers for the severity of these issues, they just skip over it with weasel words. Just read their opening statement:

> However, this research report finds that for years, significant quantities of TrueView skippable in-stream ads, purchased by many different brands and media agencies, appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps in which the consumer experience did not meet Google’s stated quality standards. For example, many TrueView in-stream ads were served muted and auto-playing as out-stream video or as obscured video players on independent sites. Often, there was little to no organic video media content between ads, the video units simply played ads only.

"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. Unless someone can conclusively find that, no one is going to take them seriously.