This is interesting, if somewhat expected:
"Oath has also achieved lower than expected benefits from the integration of the Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc. businesses."
I think there's more going on than the surface examination I've been seeing... talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-car…
"Oath has also achieved lower than expected benefits from the integration of the Yahoo Inc. and AOL Inc. businesses."
I think there's more going on than the surface examination I've been seeing... talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-car…
Yes, one of the problems here is that massive scale is, when the only business goal, fundamentally untenable as a media business practice, but there's a bunch more things as well. First of all it seems likely that the purchase was far far overvalued for a number of reasons...
The first is the deal was made on pre-Facebook-massacre traffic and you can bet that all the acquisition projections and pricing were made on the assumption that 3rd party platforms would continue to operate in the style to which Oath is accustomed. Always happens, always dumb...
The second is that the rumored Big Win was going to be the joining of user data from Oath with Verizon to achieve that always just-over-the-horizon perfect targeting. Obviously that was never going to happen, but it was likely even worse than that...
We know that Verizon was not super into sharing its data, but even when it did, things did not match up the way they had hoped. wsj.com/articles/veriz…
I'm sure the idea of merging user data sets was especially distasteful with the leaks from Yahoo just sitting right there, basically unaddressed. Then there's the lack of easy matching...
It's been reported that even when they were trying to match up data sets it wasn't going very well. That's because these data sets were coming from VERY different methodologies...
See Verizon had a ton of new, suddenly allowed to use, precise network-level data on its users it wants to use to Sell You All The Things nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t… I'm sure it made sense to find more data to match their precise data against that would make users more targetable
But having seen AOL ad tech in the wild, there's little there to handle fraud or fakery (like most ad tech). The end result is their data is likely putrid w/fake humans & fraud. They no doubt supplement it with data collection venders who only magnify the problem (like Everquote)
This is a good time to tell a little story I was told a while back see EverQuote, my favored enemy in the shitty ads world, markets itself to users as a way to get them the best car insurance. But their model makes no sense for that...
It was alleged to me by someone w/good knowledge that EverQuote makes a great deal of money by treating users like Lehman Brothers treated real estate... it allegedly sells off packages of crap user data (collected from bots & the like) w/just enough good user data to fool people
So if you are an agency, or an ad tech company, you make common practice of trying to make your targeting more precise by buying and tying in data sources from third parties. It's highly likely AOL did this...
Only most third parties are (some knowingly, others foolishly blind to it) selling fraud data that layers on top of the bs data the companies already have just creating an expanding pool of complete bullshit users for companies to target with ads they think are going to humans
That's how the ad tech industry can burn billions of dollars on fraudulent views in situations like this: mediapost.com/publications/a… ...
Or this: buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
See those ads aren't being just gazed upon by bots casually. Those ads are targeted with the help of thousands of ad tech firms. The bots are being targeted because fraud and misinformation designating them as human is being spread throughout the ecosystem like wildfire.
But those fresh new Verizon user data sets they now were just all prepped to use after any sort of control on them had been released with deregulation? Those were well known entities. Verizon had their network traffic, they knew from the data *exactly* who they wanted to target.
See, I'm sure a lot of things happened to suddenly turn AOL/HuffPo/whatever into a low value shitshow on Verizon's balance sheet but I bet the biggest one was how they fell short of what Verizon had actually valued from them: user data...
I'd bet Verizon took its fine, precise, accurate user data & tried to match it up with the AOL Ad Tech+3rd parties user data and discovered it had basically Nothing. All that added value it was going to get by fleshing out its user profiles and I bet AOL had ~nothing extra to add
See the value in the deal was going to be knowing if that Verizon Subscriber who visits WestWorld Fan Sites three times a day also likes to read Bacon Blogs on their T-Mobile phone. Then we can sell them something they'd *really* want. Precisely targeted...
Finally the WestWorld-themed Bacon Frying Gadget Maker would have to come to Verizon to make the most of their ad spend. Yes, that was the heady dream Verizon had been promised by AOL's user data...
But I'd bet most of AOLs data didn't even match up to Verizon's set of precisely designated Humans. And where it did, it didn't have much to ad to Verizon's already large user dataset. I'd bet they discovered most of that data was just useless to them.
See AOL was pulling the large scale version of what EverQuote allegedly made a business out of, it showed Verizon a bunch of cool good user data, not showing the gigs of user data that was fundamentally useless but that seemed to Verizon like it would make them billions...
I'm not sympathetic to Verizon as it is a giant company with no ethics or soul that tried to stick its hand in the cookie jar of ad tech and got the hand stuck in there with a big hunk of AOL, but I almost feel bad for the idiots who didn't understand what they were getting in to
They didn't realize that AOL's ad tech business is fundamentally bullshit. Like most ad tech businesses are fundamentally bullshit. And that they had no way out of the trap, they *can't* make their ad targeting more precise or accurate...
Because if Oath made its ad tech more precise or accurate they'd end up devaluing the enormous scale of likely bullshit users they sell to advertisers, ambiguated through the ad tech ecosystem. It was always going to be lose-lose for Verizon...
Because there was no way to create a more accurate AND more profitable Oath ad tech firm AND there was very little likelihood Oath was going to have the accurate user data they wanted to make their deregulated network-level data exponentially more profitable.
Yeah, Oath (the media company) definitely got burned by doing shitty scale chasing in its media business...
But the big value drop? That's Verizon watching all its ad tech hopes & dreams get crushed under the weight of the immense fraud, stupidity & malfeasance that plagues the ad tech industry. That's Verizon realizing all that user data they just purchased isn't value. It's a plague.
