Bob Hoffman has his book, Inside the Black Box, available on his website as a free download.
It’s a fascinating read about how online advertising is largely a con, with lots of ad fraud, made-for-advertising sites (MFAs), and opaqueness, he explains.
Bob is critical about programmatic advertising (25 per cent of programmatic ad dollars are wasted, totalling US$130 milliard). On top of that, ad fraud cost advertisers US$84 milliard in 2023, with 22 per cent of all digital ad spend stolen by fraud. Eighty per cent of the sites that programmatic ads appear on are junk. He’s also critical about real-time bidding for online ads, which is also a danger to privacy, since the system tracks and broadcasts people’s online behaviour and location 294 milliard times a day in the US and 197 milliard times a day in Europe, to thousands of companies. These broadcasts even reach Russia and China. You get the picture.
As I read this, I thought: we don’t do any of this as a publisher. Never did.
There’s a simple reason: despite a master’s in marketing, no one could ever explain these to me in clear, logical terms.
I understood the essential theories but I couldn’t see how they benefited advertiser or publisher.
Bob puts it best when he calls it a black box, one which the industry can’t be bothered untangling.
And while we used ad networks for a long, long time, late last year I vowed to have non-tracking ads on our sites (licensed sites excepting). I thought it would take me all of 2025 to get rid of them. As we stand, I think we are virtually rid of them. I say ‘virtually’ as there’ll be the occasional page where we hard-coded something. That aside, we achieved our goal in January 2025, after the last ad network we dealt with never responded to my question: do you have any non-tracked ads that you can serve, since we no longer wish to participate in online surveillance? No answer meant we halted their ad codes’ rotations on our sites.
You can buy ads with us, just not in a way that invades user privacy, and as you’re reaching real people, I think we’re justified in charging more.
The online ad world is too invested in their existing ecosystem to take us up on this, so we show a few independents’ ads instead. With Autocade reaching over 300,000 uniques per month—in fact peaking at over 400,000 in early June—we are delivering eyeballs to humans, not the bots and scrapers that we’ve blocked. Our tech isn’t perfect, either, but even if those counts are high, I know I’m still delivering lakhs’ worth of monthly visitors through our sites.
How I wish we could just block all Gmail addresses from our sites, but for our own crew and some clients using it. Autocade World’s membership form has been plagued by bots since we started (below is a mere slither of what we see). Today, we added Cloudflare Turnstile (no way were we going to use a Google captcha) to weed out the undesirables. It was hard enough to find the documentation for this as part of Simple Wordpress Membership, so I’ll link it here. This is the other side of the ad fraud coin.
You know these email addresses exist to post spam and links to their clients, another unethical approach that makes the web worse.
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