publishing
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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks
Imagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears. We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind. You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized Continue reading
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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well already: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.” So here’s a message from humanity to Google and all the other spy organizations in Continue reading
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Help: why don’t images load in https?
For some reason, many or most of the images in this blog don’t load in some browsers. Same goes for the ProjectVRM blog as well. This is new, and I don’t know exactly why it’s happening. So far, I gather it happens only when the URL is https and not http. Okay, here’s an experiment. I’ll Continue reading
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Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?
I started calling online advertising a bubble in 2008. I made “The Advertising Bubble” a chapter in The Intention Economy in 2012. I’ve been unpacking what I figure ought to be obvious (but isn’t) in 52 posts and articles (so far) in the Adblock War Series. This will be the 53rd. And it ain’t happened yet. But, now Continue reading
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An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers
[Update: 29 June 2016 — Forbes has backed off, but Wired hasn’t yet. So the invitation stands. So does a path forward.] A few days ago, I followed this link at Digg to Forbes, where I was met by the message above. Problem is, I don’t have an ad blocker installed. I have tracking protection. Continue reading
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TV Viewers to Madison Avenue: Please quit driving drunk on digital
Today AdAge gives us Clinton and Sanders Using Addressable Advertising in New York Market: Precision Targeting Is Especially Relevant in NYC, Say Political Media Observers, by @LowBrowKate. Here’s how it works: In order to aim addressable TV spots to those voters, the campaigns provide a list of the individual voters they want to target to Continue reading
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At last, Cluetrain’s time has come
While The Cluetrain Manifesto is best known for its 95 theses (especially its first, “Markets are conversations”), the clue that matters most is this one, which runs above the whole list: we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. That was Continue reading
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What everything isn’t
We know shit. I mean, in respect to the Everything that surrounds us, and the culture in which we are pickled from start to finish, what we know rounds to nothing and is, with the provisional exception of the subjects and people we study and love, incomplete and therefore somewhere between questionable and wrong. But Continue reading
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The Adblock War Series
Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested. Why online advertising sucks, Continue reading
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How adtech, not ad blocking, breaks the social contract
Advocates of adtech—tracking-based advertising—are lately claiming that ad blocking is breaking the social contract. This is self-serving and delusional bullshit. Let me explain why. In my browser, when I visit a page, I am requesting that page. I am not requesting stuff other than that page itself. This is what the hypertext protocol (http) provides. (Protocols are Continue reading
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Debugging adtech assumptions
In this post I respond in detail to assertions made in a pair of pro-adtech pieces: Advertiser’s Mandate In The Age Of Ad Blocking: Blend In, by Pat LaPointe in MediaPost; and Welcome to hell: Apple vs Google vs Facebook and the slow death of the web, by Nilay Patel in The Verge. First, Pat LaPointe— Continue reading