Share this page!

Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Twitter logo
Dec 26, 2018 • 52 tweets • 13 min read
The numbers are all fking fake, the metrics are bullshit, the agencies responsible for enforcing good practices are knowing bullshiters enforcing and profiting off all the fake numbers and none of the models make sense at scale of actual human users. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Video is a fake
Your scale business models are a house of cards on a base of imaginary numbers.

The independent measurement is a joke
The IAB numbers are bullshit
The App numbers are all fake -
The agency numbers are faked
The app installs are faked
Trending is fake -
The affiliate link referrals are faked -
The ads are fake -
The users are fake -
The landing pages are fake -
The problem isn't just that the internet is full of fakery and bullshit and bad numbers and malfunctioning metrics and bullshitters and fraudsters. The problem is that all the fake shit is layered on top of other fake shit and it just COMPOUNDS itself...
Like you get fake users, who get autoplay videos which no one is really watching
Or autoplay videos that are aggressively all over the page at the same time
Then those autoplay videos double their fake views to fake users with fake metrics
And those fake metrics get fake goal posts
And then even the fake metrics get broken half the time
And who the hell knows how many real human people even watched a video ad campaign? Much less paid attention to it? Or even noticed it?
That's not even counting the entire ad campaigns that are fake where the product is just a bullshit excuse to collect data on you
Or the metrics companies that don't work, know they don't work, and lie out their ass. poynter.org/tech-tools/201…
Or the fake publishers with no ideology other than profit -
Or the fake *video* publishers with no ideology other than profit -
Then there's the traffic laundering - avilawebfirm.com/clickbait-and-…
The $8.2 billion in fraud we actually acknowledge (back in 2015) techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/the…
There's the UX studies that *know* traditional ad formats don't work that the IAB ignores to promote traditional banner formats *anyway*
Don't forget the agencies profiting off this fakery - adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2016/10/agenci…
Don't forget either, the 7000+ ad products that suck money out of the ecosystem as middlemen but don't appear to be producing anything useful except worse user experiences
The social traffic is fake!
We've known all this forever! In 2013 we saw one scam with "a minimum of 9 billion phony ad impressions served per month." adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/04/online…
The ad tech industry just eats up the profits - buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…
When you try and purchase inventory 70% or more ends up going to these fraudsters, bullshit artists and bad ad tech vendors - mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2016/…, digiday.com/careers/ad-tec…
Even some of the writers are fake! jezebel.com/the-team-of-me…
And then you're lucky if, even if through all the bullshit you get a real ad in front of a real person on a real site, they still see it. nngroup.com/articles/why-a…
And some sites will take their fake users who don't look at ads and put them in front of VC as a fake business plan idlewords.com/talks/internet…
So you can create fake "disruption"
And maybe 90% of advertising budgets get stolen? adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/02/adtech…
There are so many fake numbers and bullshit in the ad tech/media/digital publishing ecosystem it's a defense mechanism, even the people who know they are bullshiting can't tell you where the lies end and the truth begins BY DESIGN.
Almost everyone has incentive to lie, defraud, steal, and barter on user data
And at the end of the day, we're still only sure 8% of ad impressions are seen by humans.

EIGHT
PERCENT
We can't keep trusting ad tech, the IAB, the big tech companies, or the exchanges. The marketplace requires compression, regulation, and transparency,

But every day the marketplace grows and becomes more opaque chiefmartec.com/2018/04/market…
Everything is fake, no one knows what is going on, there's not even a mechanism to create trust, much less incentive to use it. The only people in the internet ad tech game you can trust are the ones who this is hurting the most: legit advertisers, legit publishers, users.
But with every extra middleman or bullshit ad tech company added to the chain it becomes exponentially harder for the three main points in the marketplace to talk to each other or know what's going on.
No tool that isn't in the hands, transparent to, and in the control of one or more of those three end-points of the ecosystem is going to work. If it is out of the hands of legit publishers, advertisers or users the incentive for fraud will continue being greater than the truth.
The ad tech ecosystem doesn't need to be pruned. It needs to be burned to the ground. Until that happens everything that's wrong with the internet will continue to just get worse, because ad tech creates the *incentive* to make it worse.
There *is* a way forward from where we are, but everything has to change. Whole new conversations have to happen. Billions of dollars are all being transacting in this network of fakeness, and to repair that means acknowledging that we can no longer conjure money from nowhere.
And there are a lot of *real* people who are going to push hard against that. People who don't care that their system creates fake news, fake economies and fake ads. People who don't mind destroying the internet for an extra million or two.
It's going to be a challenge to acknowledge that compressing and correcting the internet's ecosystem is going to take a lot of the money built on bullshit and make it disappear. I think burning it all down and building anew is easier. But even that is *so* hard.
Even getting people to acknowledge that the problem of the fake internet is based in money, even if it produces politics as well, is hard. And I don't see a fix unless we start *really* regulating from the government level. Which is its own challenge.
The internet is full of fake bullshit, run on fake numbers, profitable on fake models, feeding you fake information, supporting fake users. None of this is by accident. Make good choices, build the right technology, tell Congress to start making laws.
Now I'm going to get back to doing my best to try to build better tools and approaches.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Aram Zucker-Scharff

Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Chronotope

Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Jan 30
The problem with many digital ad conversations is modern capitalism has bent our society into thinking that earning money makes a company virtuous... but there are many ad tech companies that are built on nothing but fraud. Billions of dollars built on entirely imaginary value.
The ad tech ecosystem grew in product count from 100ish to over 8,000 in just a decade. That isn't real growth. Those aren't real profits. It's fraud built on top of misleading metrics built on top of BS. A stack of fictitious capital only barely held up by user data.
Ad tech firms will demand that the share they cull from user data, or even really from the illusion of user data, somehow be maintained for them. Because they claim profit is intrinsically good t/f it most be preserved. Profit is not intrinsically good for society.
Read 7 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Jan 29
I think there's a clear case with Spotify, they pay his salary, they're responsible. Some of the other cases coming up are less clear, but I think equally correct...
Anyone can self nominate on top Apple Podcasts for example, and if it was just a directory, a lack of moderation, while a different case, is also bad and needs to be addressed. But I don't think it's just that problem...
Apple Podcasts intermediates itself between downloader and site. When you download a podcast to listen on Apple News you're usually getting a cached version off of Apple's servers. So, for podcasts listed by Apple, it essentially acts as a CDN...
Read 9 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Dec 17, 2021
My grandfather is a doctor & medical researcher & has been very concerned with COVID (rightfully so) and, in the biggest indication to me that the world is shifting back into lockdown, has decided, w/input from all of us, to cancel the in-person family holiday event this weekend.
I think this is absolutely the right choice. We have a ton of at-risk people at all ages of the family. Considering that he was ok with in-person Thanksgiving I can't think of a more foreboding sign to me personally that NYC/the US/the world is backsliding into a lockdown.
"The new despair wells up from the gap between what we knew & what we did, like sulfur seeping from deep-sea vents. Having had the chance to tame the virus and failed to do so, and then fallen prey to exactly the risks that we foresaw—this is a new burden" theatlantic.com/health/archive…
Read 10 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Dec 16, 2021
Designing media companies with a focus purely on scale is a bad idea. cjr.org/the_media_toda…
👀
The biggest problem is that almost every media company that chases scale never accounts for the resulting costs and that's what does them in. Hopefully Vox can avoid this... but they are def fighting against the tide of history if that's the way they are looking at this deal.
Read 14 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Oct 17, 2021
Boomers refusing to move on professionally and just slowly washing up to the top of every profession while becoming, in average, increasingly incapable of handling their accruing responsibilities exhausts me. The negative results are always exhaustingly predictable.
I'm already hearing bad things about the new Jon Stew*rt show, and I dunno what people expected. We didn't "need" him during Trump or now, he was great for the time he was in. Times have changed. Should have let him go off and produce, lobby, whatever;...
let people who have to live in this mess step up to take the lead instead of maintaining the gerontocracy run by those who aren't going to have to live through the climate apocalypse.
Read 8 tweets
Aram Zucker-Scharff Profile picture
Oct 17, 2021
Had an interesting conversation with a restaurant manager today. Apparently because COVID has changed hours for restaurants and they were not evenly updating services the big listing services are scraping each other, so...
if you update hours on Yelp but not Google your new hours can get overwritten by a bad updating process, & b/c updates can be cached, they can't update their hours, b/c the 3 big services (Google, Yelp, Facebook) keep undoing the updates with cached data scraped from each other.
Now, finally, I understand why the listing services have been so wonky listing hours as places reopened.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @Chronotope has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @Chronotope!

Read all threads by @Chronotope

:(