How is your ad network different from this?

11.02.2021/13.09

No point beating around the bush when it comes to yet another advertising network knocking on our door. This was a quick reply I just fired off, and I might as well put it on this blog so there’s another place I can copy it from, since I’m likely to call on it again and […]

This was the natural outcome of greed, in the forms of monopoly power and sensationalist media

11.01.2021/23.58

I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy op–ed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didn’t take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was […]

Two big reasons not to use Gmail

03.10.2020/09.14

I was absolutely shocked to learn this is how Gmail works. If I read this correctly, #Google lets more than one person use a single email address (in this case, over 200!)? How daft! Why would they do that? pic.twitter.com/KtTO6PnDEI — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) September 27, 2020 PS.: This was the image linked […]

I prefer the 99 per cent who don’t rely on Google

10.03.2020/08.57

Almost three screens of apps, none of which require Google. I had a good discussion on Twitter today with Peter Lambrechtsen, and if you want to have a peek, it’s here. He’s a really decent guy who makes some good points. But it does annoy me that my partner, whose phone is a stock standard […]

Why I don’t sign up to new online ad networks in a hurry

26.02.2020/13.37

In the early days, banner advertising was pretty simple. By the turn of the century, we dealt with a couple of firms, Burst Media and Gorilla Nation, and we had a few buy direct. Money was good. This is the pattern today if we choose to say yes to anyone representing an ad network. […]

Capitalism falls down when it’s rigged

04.12.2019/09.57

Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years. He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]

The newer the Instagram, the buggier; and why no one should use Google Drive

24.11.2019/01.15

I’ve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. We’ve already seen that it can’t cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work. I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as […]

Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

13.11.2019/11.13

People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Last month, Bob Hoffman’s excellent The Ad Contrarian newsletter noted, ‘I believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, […]

Google collects more enemies—we haven’t been critical enough of it

05.09.2017/12.43

My complaints about Google over the years—and the battles I’ve had with them between 2009 and 2014—are a matter of record on this blog. It appears that Google has been making enemies who are much more important than me, and in this blog post I don’t mean the European Union, who found that the big […]

Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016

12.01.2017/02.45

Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too. Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front. First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]