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Braedon

@braedon

Sep 23

Of the ~1M ads.txts Well-Known tracks, 99% authorize at least one Google account. Over 97% authorize at least one Google account as DIRECT.

The next closest ad system is Magnite at 24% (19% DIRECT).

Looking at just sites in the top 100k (based on Tranco rank), over 97% authorize at least one Google account (93% DIRECT).

Once again, the next closest ad system is Magnite, with 73% (61% DIRECT).

Google's reach isn't quite so broad in mobile/CTV.

90% of app-ads.txts authorize at least one Google account (87% DIRECT).

Magnite is the next highest at 45% (22% DIRECT).

Read 4 tweets

Braedon

@braedon

Sep 23

Of the ~1M ads.txts Well-Known tracks, 70% only authorize a single account to sell their programmatic adspace.

Of those 700k+ sites, their single account is from Google over 99% of the time. The next largest ad system is MGID, with just over 1k sites.

well-known.dev/?q=resource%3A…

Looking at just sites in the top 100k (based on Tranco rank), far less only authorize one account - 20% of the 19k ads.txts.

But the pattern is similar - it's a Google account 95% of the time.

Google's dominance in low-complexity programmatic ad setups is simply staggering.

Read 5 tweets

Braedon

@braedon

Sep 21

Let me introduce you to srbin[.]info, a Serbian site that publishes a mixture Russian war propaganda, anti LGBT hate, conspiracies about the "deep state"/George Soros, etc.

With top stories like this, brands wouldn't be advertising on it, right? Right?

🧵 1/n

@amazon

But of course they are!

There are ads plastered all over the site, and while some are bottom of the barrel, there's some pretty big brands too.

Here's the full version of the above image. There are ads for @amazon pharmacy, and a particularly unfortunate ad for @nielsen.

2/n

@GoogleAds

Here's a @GoogleAds ad for @WSJ.

I don't know what @goldbelly is, but their ads were the most persistent - various versions will show up a lot in this thread.

3/n

Read 10 tweets

Braedon

@braedon

Jul 11

An aspect of the current sellers.json implementation mess I haven't talked about much yet is that a lot of ad systems go by different domains in different places.

This isn't great when the whole ads.txt/sellers.json/SupplyChain system is based on matching domains.

1/n

There's three things that need to line up:

1. A specific domain is used to list accounts from the ad system in ads.txts,
2. That domain hosts a sellers.json which contains those accounts,
3. The ad system's accounts with other ad systems use that as their owner domain.

2/n

When ad systems change their name and/or domain, or get bought/merged with other companies, these can get out of sync, breaking validations.

I've been trying to find these cases and determine what the canonical domain for each system is, but that's often not easy.

3/n

Read 8 tweets

Braedon

@braedon

Jul 11

Adtech head-scratcher for the day: what on earth did Mintegral just do to its sellers.json?

9,997 changed sellers - only 29 left unchanged.

The vast majority were new additions - 8,496 of them. But only 6 have a name or domain.

The rest have no ownership details, despite *not* being marked confidential.

750 sellers modified. Mostly (655) to remove name/domain ownership data.

Read 6 tweets

Braedon

@braedon

Jul 5

https://twitter.com/braedon/status/1540168004830232576

I want to dig a bit more into why removing seller domains is problematic.

Here's 5 accounts that recently had their domains removed. Three are for Russian propaganda sites. Two are for conspiracy/pseudoscience/disinfo/etc. sites.

1/6

https://twitter.com/braedon/status/1540168004830232576

The primary way to track which adtech companies work with "problematic" sites like this is via the seller domain field.

There are sometimes other ways to work it out, but they're a lot more manual, and the links are often more deniable. (Perhaps the point of the removals?)

2/6

It's unclear if these accounts are transacting, but 4 of the 5 are currently authorized by their respective (previously listed) domains.

This is despite the Clickio accounts being removed months ago in March, only to be restored as "confidential" on the 1st of July.

3/6

Read 6 tweets

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