The advertising industry has been living a lie

> What made you think advertising on a few hundred thousand sites many any sense it the first place?

I'm intending to reach millions of people with my ads. Those millions of people visit a few hundred thousand sites. Why would I only buy ads on a few sites. Big brands buy tv ads and billboards on thousands of shows, whats the difference? Buying on many sites also allows me to reach a very niche audience that otherwise you could never reach (or it would be 10x as expensive).

> How much is being wasted on fraud protection that doesn't do the job?

This is a good question and I don't have an answer. I spend money on fraud/bot protection and can't always verify if it works. But as long as my ads are producing results and have a good ROI or the client is happy, I don't even need to know what the answer is.

> Why does every single publisher or ad tech company boast of working with three or four anti-fraud vendors at once?

Digital marketing as an industry moves super super fast. At least one of those four anti-fraud vendors will pivot in the next year, and another will focus on something niche like viewability. Having multiple vendors is necessary, and there isn't really a downside. The switching costs for me between two vendors is literally unticking one check box, and ticking another.

I'm not familair with the author, but it honestly doesn't seem like he understands advertising. Are you complaining about the use of third party data (but no mention of privacy?), that advertisers are lazy (personal attacks..okay. The whole industry is lazy?), that advertisers buy ads on and support small websites, or are you just feeding on the ever-popular disdain for advertising?

There are no doubt problems in the industry, but if you want to write about it you'll need to make a claim and support it with data. If you think 3rd party data doesn't work, or allowing ads on lots of sites doesn't work then claim that and prove it.

I've been saying this needs investigating for a long time. From my understanding of things like triggers, priming, threshold for action, etc -- you're probably doing yourself a disservice having out of context advertising.

When you advertise in context, you get constructive interference between the context and your message, leading to a more powerful effect -- your buyer was ready to hear what you wanted to sell; when you advertise out of context, you get destructive interference between the context and your message, leading to muddled or even negative effects -- advertising roast beef on a porn site is probably bad for all three parties! (No matter how much the person viewing porn likes roast beef.)

"Targeted" rather than topic based advertising ignores basic facets of human psychology (eg, that we're very context based animals) in order to pump up ad stock and sell more volume of a diluted product -- because all of the "targeting" is fundamentally a worse replacement for the signal shown by visiting a topical website. It's about inventory fluffing, not efficiency.

That said, the article didn't do the best job supporting that point.