5 Problems of Ad Tech To be Solved Not To End Up The Era of Free Internet

Current publishers place too much poor quality advertisements on their internet pages and sites , which turns the whole Web space into a clickbait labyrinth. As the amount of information on the Internet increased, it became too hard to track all the traffic. In addition, this is the opportunity for shady resources to publish ads as established publishers. They use such a situation to deceive the ad metric system and to monetize so-called phantom website visitors, or the visitors who clicked the link unwillingly and came to their site with these pop-ups. Established publishers refused to use Google as a platform for traffic, and they started to deal with shady brokers to help them earn money through unwilling visitors.

Due to these conditions, the smartphone industry and app creators are fighting together against online ads hell, by producing and developing different ad-blockers. In case the ad industry doesn’t care about consumers’ desires and needs, its future can be predicted as a strong decline and, as a result, the total collapse.

This overload with shady website link ads on Google and other searсh platforms made people use Facebook and other social media as a main means to get news. Moreover, Facebook is leading as a news resource compared to traffic volume. Outbrain and Taboola, as traffic brokers, became popular too. Advertisement publishers are not interested in the place from which their audience is coming from, as well as the place where the ad was shown, until it is connected with illegal or adult content.A virtual assistant is a great resource to hire an assistant to solve the problem of ads and shady websites, as virtual assistant can prepare a list of such websites and find specialists to find a clear platform and ad publisher for your business.

Talking about the tendency of shady resources to publish ads as the established publishers, for example, let’s look at toastedballs.com. It has 50 mln viewers a month, mostly males, with an incredibly miserable interaction of users with content, but virtually this website has no backlinks, and inappropriate traffic. This situation means that all these viewers were bought with adult popups, the ad tech is from Criteo, and paid on a CPM basis. Criteo is not interested in the place from which their audience is coming, though they rely on algorithms. Analyzing this type of approach, it’s easy to come to the idea that Criteo invests in a useless website to earn cash from adult traffic.

Traffic brokers are proposing traffic laundering through creating a chain of many shell sites to redirect traffic, which was gained through unwilling visitors, deceived by pop-ups, fake browser tabs, or pop-unders, and most of these viewers are led to low-end web sources. All this system serves to overcome the ads’ metrics and monetize the “empty” numbers of visitors.

You will be sent for less than a second to different shell sites in case your IP shows you’re valuable for the ads tech business. The purpose of such an algorithm is to raise the rate and quality of visitors for these web resources. It allows them to conclude contracts that are more profitable and earn more money. (Scheme #1)

Even the huge brands and worldwide known labels like Adobe, Alliance Data, Omnicom display ads through these shell sites; nevertheless, it’s not their fault, it’s because of their advertising agencies, which failed to find out they’re dealing with “bad guys”, who are gaming with ad tech.

Problem #1:

The scheme is designed for websites that have no possibilities to convert traffic into money directly through ads, as the content they have is not legitimate. You can recognize these websites with the help of Alexa; all of them were launched in autumn 2015, and their audience comes from traffic brokers. The demographic map is remarkable: for example, rich males from the Caucasus, well educated, at the age of 25-44.

A couple of years ago, Google was the ruling authority on the Web, and all the publishers played according to its rules to get a higher place in the list of search results. But recently, as social media conquered the Internet and users started to pay more attention to recommendations from social media, ad tech creators have concentrated on catchy headlines, forgetting about clean HTML. Such conditions lead to the clickbait boom on the Internet. (Problem #2)

Problem #2:

Another way to get money from the number of visitors for traffic brokers is to conclude long-term contracts with huge established labels (for example, Times Inc) to place their banners as a recommendation under each article with a catchy headline (rumors about celebrities). These banners have to attract new visitors on a regular basis through clickbait.(Problem #3)

Problem #3:

Recommendation banners leading to shell websites

The links that brokers demonstrate through the banners differ a lot from the content on the webpage, as well as from the IP of a user. What’s even worse is that about 50% of them sent the user to different shell sites, overloaded with ads. Nevertheless, it’s quite enough to pay 3 cents to Taboola for each viewer as the CPR is high. In this way, OutBrain attracted Times Inc to conclude a contract in 2014 with an income of $100 mln for Times, but according to the information above, this deal would bring more damage than profit for the brand, as Times readers will be constantly sent to shady websites with trashy content.

Users are so over fatigued with tons of ads and clickbait hell, so smartphone designers and Google started to produce adblock programs. The popularity of adblockers is a protest against the new format of the Web. But the further popularization of this tendency would bring losses for all. The problem is that ad blockers can’t help end the main issue, the evolution of the Internet is highly needed.

Problem #4:

The wave of adblock programs and other browser programs to avoid ads made digital marketing ineffective. That means ad tech needs evolution too, until they wouldn’t change, the situation will be getting even worse.

Problem #5:

Ad publishers are focused on a short-term perspective, not caring much about the quality of the content, trying to maximize income and save more money on advertising technologies.

They have to interact with Internet users to understand which kind of ads are appropriate for them, because ads are the necessary evil to keep the Web free for use.

In case both users and ad tech producers want the Internet to stay free, they have to think about how to create a system to satisfy common needs and find a respective compromise. Ad designers need to assess the nature of advertisement space and concede that Internet clients can’t perceive huge loads of various advertisements, and they should concentrate on quality. The payment for the prime promotion space must be reasonable, to provide the rules maintenance by ad publishers, and stop sponsoring traffic brokers and other shady structures.