Thread by @johnnyryan

New data: tracking-based ads imperil rights & publisher sustainability.
They divert data & revenue from publishers (and cause disinformation, fraud, dangerous data leakage).
@paultang @AlexandraGeese @BirgitSippelMEP @echo_pbreyer @kimvsparrentak @woelken iccl.ie/digital-data/s…

@paultang @AlexandraGeese @BirgitSippelMEP @echo_pbreyer @kimvsparrentak @woelken Tracking-based ads siphon publishers’ audience data to Google & Facebook.
(Publishers, read Google's terms carefully policies.google.com/technologies/p…) /2

Since 2004 Google has moved its ad revenue comes from placing ads on publishers' sites to higher margin ads its own websites and apps. It does this with the benefit of data taken from publishers.
Tracking enables this.
Thanks @jason_kint who highlighted this first.
/3

@jason_kint Tracking-based ads facilitate fraud “bots” (that behave like humans on publishers’ websites/apps to draw tracking-based ad spending back to fraudulent websites/apps).
Estimates of fraud are huge. € billions. But the industry has no authoritative view of the cost of adfraud. /4

The tracking-based ad industry is dominated by intermediary tech firms, not publishers. These “adtech” firms connect advertisers to publishers, and extract € billions large hidden fees, known as "adtech tax".

35-70% of every ad € goes to adtech, not the publisher. /5

Tracking-based advertising turns legitimate publishers’ audiences in to commodities that can be bought cheaply on low value & disinformation websites.
It also causes the largest data breach ever recorded. /6

This broadcasts what everyone on the Internet is reading and watching, and where they are, many hundreds of billions of times a day. And that lets us all be profiled based on where we go in the real world, and what we do online. /7

Tracking-based advertising allows legitimate publishers’ audiences to be profiled and micro-targeted cheaply on low value & disinformation websites.
The IAB Audience Taxonomy standardises how people are profiled, including politics & religion (see web.archive.org/web/2020110104…) /8

Practical evidence from publishers shows that revenue increases when tracking is removed.
Actual ad revenue increased by 149% when Dutch publisher NPO replaced tracking-based ads with contextual ads.
(Revenue even grew despite Covid-19’s severe impact on the ad market.) /9

Websites operated by a Norwegian news publishing group earned an average of 391% more for contextual ads than tracking based ads over 12 months. Bravo @BuggeErik
(H/T @ka_iwanska, who I think first told me about Kobler)
/10

Also... TV2, a major Norwegian news website, reports that ads sold through Kobler’s contextual targeting return a 210% higher average price than competing tracking-based ad targeting. @BuggeErik

See the full report at iccl.ie/digital-data/s…

TechCrunch has the story on the negotiations currently underway at the European Parliament on whether to ban or curtail tracking-based ads, and some of the data in our report.
techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/ins…