Nandini Jammi Profile picture
Now: Co-Founder @CheckMyAdsHQ, Your Friendly Neighborhood Adtech Watchdog 🐾 / Prev: Co-Founder, @slpng_giants / BSky: @nandoodles.checkmyads.org

May 9, 2022, 8 tweets

Last yr, writers @ The Post Millennial began quietly writing for a Canadian tourism site: WhoaCanada.ca, churning out anodyne content about Tim Horton's + things to do in Toronto.

Why? Follow along to learn about TPM's secret (and final) source of advertising revenue.

I first caught whiff of WhoaCanada.ca while digging around @Yahoo's sellers.json directory. TPM's account contains 3 domains:

•ThePostMillennial(.)com (hate site)
•HumanEvents(.)com (hate site)
•Whoa Canada ("7 desserts you can get in Toronto")

Lol what❓

It took me ~15 sec to realize that WhoaCanada.ca *is* The Post Millennial — an ad operation explicitly designed to be the "brand safe" arm of TPM. This secret domain allows them to continue collecting ad $$, effectively subsidizing TPM's racist + transphobic content.

It's a transparent effort to evade brand safety filters. They know that @doubleverify + @integralads only scan webpages for keyword blocklists. So if an outlet like TPM is hemorrhaging money, all they need to do is spin up a content farm about Canada..and use it to pay for this.

This tactic - using nice, happy content to subsidize dark disinfo outlets - is extremely common. For ex, Bannon's co Performance One Media uses *Weather Nation TV* to subsidize War Room.👇🏼

This allows them to survive + circumvent domain blocks.

While advertisers block pages and domains, TPM is operating one step beyond the advertiser's line of vision. They know big budget advertisers like @swarovski @hbomax @hotelsdotcom rely on providers like @doubleverify + @integralads.

And they know how deficient their tech rly is

This is why we no longer ask advertisers & ad exchanges to block/drop domains. In order to cut off disinformation outlets, they must drop the entire SELLER ID.

In this case, @yahoobusiness needs to drop Seller ID 28610 from their inventory to meet their supply standards.

I already privately contacted @Simonfesta last wk with this information and nothing has been done. It's always sad to see a man w/ position of influence tweeting like just another #resistance account.

Yahoo has anti-hate and disinfo rules. Enforce them.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling