Thread by @Chronotope

It's wild to discover that I'm not the only one with a 'WTF is going on at OZY?' folder in my notes and I'm enjoying seeing everyone open their's up.

Anyway... for fun let's talk about some Ozy ad tech stuff! Ozy is repped by four different Google accounts... three DIRECT, one RESELLER. well-known.dev/resources/ads_…

Ozy has just under 40 ad tech providers on each page. Only... where are the ads? Ozy doesn't host it's own video, as far as I can see *all* their on-site video is run through YouTube or off-site partners, including PBS, OWN and Hulu https://www.ozy (dot) com/pg/show/

So... no ads running on Preroll. What are all these ad tech tags and scripts doing?

Let's take an article featured in a recent newsletter... ozy.com/news-and-polit…

There are no ads. Despite being repped by 4 google accounts... there is no GAM Google Tag on this page...

Maybe it's on more recently updated articles? For a news site it is very difficult to fine a *recent* news story. Let's go to the sitemap! ozy.com/sitemap_index.…

Ok... trying to find a story from like this week.

From August: no ads - https://www.ozy (dot) com/news-and-politics/who-are-you-calling-a-communist/440055/

Ah, found their RSS feed for the news / politics section. https://www.ozy (dot) com/news-and-politics/feed/

Apparently the latest news/politics story is a news quiz. https://www.ozy (dot) com/qz/news-and-politics/the-ozy-news-quiz-173/442496/

Despite ad tech on page, no ads.

Looks like the most recent news story in News Site Ozy dot com was published 8 days ago. https://www.ozy (dot) com/news-and-politics/who-are-the-highest-paid-public-workers-in-america/441540/

23 ad trackers called.... no ads.

Their most recent newsletter maybe links to something w/ads? https://www.ozy (dot) com/pg/newsletter/the-daily-dose/442377/

Well, it appears to have a baked in ad, but nothing running to make use of the on page trackers.

Also, no links to individual stories on their domain.

Maybe they are reporting on stuff like books to get affiliate links to earn revenue that way? https://www.ozy (dot) com/the-new-and-the-next/12-books-you-need-to-read-2/442687/

If they are I'm not seeing it. No affiliate links in this list of books

No affiliate links in this wellness article! https://www.ozy (dot) com/need-to-know/the-wonderful-world-of-wellness/442750/

But, we've got our first ads! They're run by Smart ad server not Google and while they seem to sync with bidders, it's entirely internal-link house ads.

And when I refresh the page... the ads go away? Why?

So now we can see an ad server and some ad slots, but they're not ever loading for me on 95% of my page loads... what's going on?

In theory... they could be doing only direct sold ads... but how are they sustaining a *company* when there isn't a single direct sold ad showing up here? Is it really just off video partnerships they don't even own themselves?

And here's the other really weird thing... not a single article I read looking through all these has non-spam comments. And they use Facebook comments which, if set up correctly, work with their Facebook page as well.

I know they're all about Positive conversations... but you're telling me the home page stories, which clearly have bad moderation if they're letting spam like this come through and sit for a week, are getting no comments? Even ones criticizing state uni coach pay?

Checked out The New and the Next RSS feed and found another ad - https://www.ozy (dot) com/the-new-and-the-next/feed/

But it's a house ad to a sponsored brand partnership https://www.ozy (dot) com/nsnss/?dclid=CPT24bftovMCFZTG4QodLiQNAA ...

The main feature of that page btw is an embedded YouTube video. The video is *unlisted*, has only one thumb up, 24 views and *0* comments. youtube (dot) com/watch?v=KXJRBO7wmiQ

So, one last thing to check... SEM Rush, what's it's footprint for last month?

semrush.com/analytics/over…

242.3k in Organic Search Traffic, almost entirely US, mostly imgs

1.4m backlinks... via 29.27k domains

861 ads, across 545 sites...
Many are for the 2020 festival though.

Their top search term is for "masako katsura", but it looks like most of the placement stats are coming in on the image, of which their's is listed third.

If you're curious, on the basis of search page performance, here's who SEM Rush thinks is their competitors.

Anyway, dinner time, that's just a short dive into the inexplicable weirdness of Ozy I see when I wear my ad tech hat.

Time for my own disclosure: I interviewed for a high up position at Ozy once a while back. I talked to the top level folks, my recollection was they seemed personally nice...

then they asked me to examine the site and assess and I went through a much more in depth look (using nothing but the public site, no in-house data) and got a crazier version of the thread here, freaked out because it is *inexplicable*...

And I was worried there might be something like... actually bad--not just ad tech weirdness bad--going on and I ghosted on the process because I didn't know what else to do when I realized nothing about the site made sense. Still, nothing does. Anyway, that's the disclosure.

tl:dr; now you too can see what I saw which was the sort of layout of technology that doesn't make a lot of sense unless something real weird is going on somewhere.

I don't know what weird thing is going on, but yeah, it still weirds me out.

https://twitter.com/braedon/status/1443060246864220162?s=19

https://twitter.com/alexweprin/status/1443220103110270976

That feeling when you know for sure that you dodged a bullet. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/09/30…

This is prob for the best, but also I'm sad that this means we will likely never get the sort of full lawyer-involved investigation that will tell me wtf *exactly* went on at OZY.

https://twitter.com/benyt/status/1444048250898685954