Medical supplements or plans that make claims that clearly aren’t real, financial scams (crypto or get-rich-quick schemes), or product scams (this new device that ‘they’ don’t want you to know about can heat/cool your house in minutes for pennies!).
I’m pretty sure none of this is legal, and Google obviously doesn’t care.
FWIW I have ad personalization off - perhaps it’s a bit better for those who don’t?
The reality is, of course, that Google and its ilk doesn't give a single rat's ass about people falling from scams or getting infected by malware. Scams and malware pays better than "ethical" ads (to the degree that such a thing exists). It's a travesty that there are apparently no laws against their behavior.
I remember listening to an episode of Better Offline a buddy sent me and anyone who knows about Ed knows that basically half his crusade is against bad AI implementation/“slop”/etc. He’s broadly against the current LLM rush.
First ad when I fired up the podcast episode was yet aother injected ad for yet another AI agent company as generic as the rest. Literally the organizations he’s railing against and calling wasteful. It was clearly because he handed off the advertising to one of these injection services.
Sidebar: these ads tend to perform terribly. Actual ad reads by the host(s) are the only thing that lead to meaningful conversions in podcasts.
But I don't care* about that, I care that they're visually obnoxious and sometimes slow.
* Well, usually. Way back when, there used to be occasional news about browser sandbox escapes.
I'm happy to pay for media, news, social networks etc. I don't purchase things based on anything other than personal recommendations and research. I have no use for advertising, and I have no desire or need for ad-supported platforms. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. People say advertising works, and that justifies it. The thing is, advertising only works on enough people to justify it. Everyone else hates it with a passion, or studiously avoids it. I'm not sure if we're a majority or a minority, it doesn't matter, but we suffer advertising and wish it were gone.
Advertising needs to change. It would be nice if it just went away, but realistically that's not going to happen. It needs to be recognised as harmful and regulated as a harmful product.
there is in the UK. And likely in most other jurisdictions too. But it's about penalizing the advertisers rather than the platform. Which clearly neither works at scale nor across borders.
This definitely feels like a better use case for an "online safety act" -- but instead we got censorship laws....
In the USA I’m pretty sure advertising scams - even the more ‘benign’ ones like claiming a product does something it doesn’t do or lying about its efficiency - are illegal. There’s just no - or not nearly enough - enforcement.
We've known that advertising is "filling the world with bile and garbage" for decades.
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The situation’s been like this for a few years now.
The biggest giveaway is when the ads are dropped in the middle of someone talking. Pretty much any hits that are manually added are led into by the hosts if it’s mid-show.
If she had had more time, I could see Khan going after fake ads as well. There's nothing to me that suggests that she was deliberately ignoring fraudulent ads when she was extremely pro-consumer in nearly every other policy.
If it wasn't a threat, they wouldn't police it so hard.
Sure they can; it just slows the money-pipe
Are Meta and TikTok better at filtering scammy ads out? Maybe their ML recommendation systems realize I’d never click on such an ad and the other platforms can’t figure that out.
While it has gotten around the "logical fallacy community", for lack of a better term, in the last few years, it could still stand to be known by more people. It's become very popular. I think there are many who have subconsciously picked it up as just how things are done.
https://oig.hhs.gov/fraud/consumer-alerts/fraud-alert-nation...
When you heard the vocal equivalent of large type text every real person knew that it was time to get grandma away from the TV but... the people at the TV network didn't, law enforcement didn't, your congressman didn't, anybody in a position of power didn't. And no wonder people feel cynical, hate the media, distrust the cops, distrust politicians, feel "the game is rigged", etc.
and if you've ever listened to one of Robert's (CZM executive producer and host of some of their flagships) other podcasts you might understand why companies don't want him doing ad reads.
Yes, but those are dynamic too: if you go back and download old episodes, for example, you'll get the current run of ads.
First I've ever heard this, and I have been working in marketing all my life.
What exactly do you mean by this? Where have you heard it?
Now, we're getting diaper commercials all over youtube. I assume we're flagged in some database as likely having a new child, but you can't ever know for sure.
I’m not even against pre-recorded spots by whoever the sponsor is if that’s his deal though the conversion rate on those are not as good. It’s just the completely random ads that the podcaster(s) don’t even know are playing on their show. The entire reason advertising on podcasting was more effective in the 2010s and early 2020s was because there was a little more trust with their listeners, there’s a relationship at play even if it’s parasocial. If they were actively reading on air, I assumed that they vetted the company and it at least passed the smell test (though plenty sure didn’t, I would say the bar was a little higher than other media formats).
For the bulk of legit advertisers, this won't affect the bottom line of a given campaign and will keep out the scammers, etc. Leading to a much higher quality ecosystem. It would also give Google the potential for a higher percentage share of profits in the system. It would also likely reduce the CPM pricing though, possibly to a larger extent than profits from the validation system itself.
But it would be a much healthier overall system.
Google disabled the Adblock, Facebook let the ad run on their site, and Microsoft hosted the malicious site on their cloud provider. Shoutout to Microsoft for taking the site down within the hour after I reported it- more than I can say for any of the blatantly illegal or scam ads I’ve seen on YouTube. but still, 3 big tech companies that could have definitely stopped this is they really wanted to.
What did your grandmother need Chrome for? You couldn't find the 5m it would take to set her up with Firefox?
The cost of enforcement would break every government's budget. The cost asymmetry is the problem.
(US infocoms, and Google in particular, aren't reputable companies any more. Ban them all.)
Hmm. How are these people not part of the industry exactly?
As if people read only reuptable sites ...
You can look up your Google ad profile and see if "pregnant" is one of your account's attributes. Facebook has a similar page somewhere.
https://podcastindex.org/apps podcasting 2.0 app index.
It's not like the client app is inserting them.
I mean, I guess I can imagine an exceptionally-scummy podcast app, but that's not what we're talking about here.
It's just an mp3 file!
edit: I should point out that i pitched, to Apple, the ability to dynamically insert ads sometime around ipod 5th gen, 2005-2006, but not for podcasts, but for downloadable videos, like "last night's TV show". I'm sorry i did this. I don't mean i had the idea and said "hey this is an idea", i had the entire infrastructure documented, it was drop in and go. Whoops.
at a certain point, one has to ask themselves if whatever media they're ingesting is worth the scum.
DAI is a thing and my initial point several comments ago was that too many podcasts implement it, let advertisers drop their stuff in (not their own read), and never check what’s actually being run on their show. That’s all my point was about.
These ads are not just not baked into the audio file, they are legitimately a mystery to the people running the show sometimes. And I think that that’s kind of unconscionable tbh. Podcasts (especially early on) owe a lot of their success to the feeling of “authenticity,” they feel more personal and less “corporate” generally. Whether that’s reality or not we can of course debate, but it’s how audiences perceived them. The reason on air reads have been generally successful for podcasts is because of the trust between the podcast and the audience that has been built over time. This runs directly counter to it.