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.
Here's the scoop: Google has been pushing a new shiny AI product called Performance Max on its clients.
PMax runs ads & auto-optimizes for you. But it doesn't let you control your ads at all — not even to *exclude* your ads from key categories, like YouTube for Kids.
On the other hand, PMax doesn't filter out ads for YouTube for Kids either.
So in between videos titled "Can you name these vegetables?" kids have been watching ads featuring car accidents, violent explosions and people drowning.
In Jan. 2023, The Donald started running ads through an ad network called "Publir."
Turns out Publir's co-founder is (was?) the co-owner and CTO of RealClearPolitics. He was running both companies at the same time — and maybe still is.
At first, I thought Publir might be his own independent business or side hustle. His LinkedIn says he launched the company in 2021 after leaving RealClear in 2020.
But as I dug in, I realized that this is not the case at all.
HOLY SHIT. @WSJ is reporting that ~80% of the ads @YouTube serves across the web have violated their own terms of service — and are therefore subject to refunds.
This is...a devastatingly huge deal. @GoogleAds is about to be out billions of $$.
Google has never been weaker than it is RIGHT now. Their search ads business - their main source of $$ - has been tanking since ChatGPT. They're facing 2 antitrust lawsuits.
Now, turns out they've been caught in a multi-billion dollar scam?? Oh my god.
Let me explain the scam itself:
Advertisers pay YouTube good money to run their ads on before or after a YouTube video, on the YouTube platform.
But sometimes, YouTube runs these ads videos embedded on 3rd party websites, like you see here:
TheDonald is WAY too toxic to be running ads. So how is happening?
An adtech middleman called Publir (@publirllc) — which has connected them to every major ad exchange by hiding TheDonald under various fake names & accounts.