Speaking of Twitter doing weird things, I checked out some of Lucire’s settings on there today, something I haven’t looked at for a long time. I do not ever recall telling them I was in Malaysia—it’s not a country we’ve even had a correspondent in—and Estonian and Welsh were never marked as languages. I’m […]
Read More… from Looks like Twitter makes up your settings, too
Bob Hoffman always has great stuff from the advertising world, especially on Facebook. My criticisms have come from the user’s perspective and the very obvious BS Facebook peddles, while Bob reads the US press and combines it with a professional’s knowledge. In his latest newsletter, it’s a familiar tale: Facebook realized misinformation had greater […]
Read More… from With Facebook, the dots are really easy to join, so why haven’t more done so?
From Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter of May 24: ‘two weeks ago a study by the ISBA and PcW that reported that half of every “programmatic” ad dollar is scraped by adtech middlemen’ and ‘According to a paper written by Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at Yale University, Google pockets about 40¢ of every […]
Read More… from Online advertising dollars: Google’s cut from your work is 40 per cent
Not withstanding that I can’t edit my advertising preferences on Facebook—they took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)—I see they now lie about what ads I’ve seen and clicked on. I can categorically say […]
Read More… from Is Facebook lying to customers about who has seen their ads?
Olivia St Redfern has featured yours truly in her lockdown day 2, part 1 podcast, so I decided to record another response. It brings to mind something Steve McQueen once said. ‘I’m not an actor. I’m a reactor.’ As in, he could react to a line from another actor. Anyone who has seen […]
Read More… from Is there a type that works from home more easily?
I’ll be interested to read the judgement, should it get to that point: Facebook is being sued over allegedly inflating its audience numbers, and COO Sheryl Sandberg and financial officer David Wehner are also named. The plaintiff alleges that Facebook has known this for years. The suit dates from 2018 but there are new […]
Read More… from The FT covers lawsuit alleging Facebook knew about inflated metrics
Here’s a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: ‘Photographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. He’d been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, […]
Read More… from Don’t rely on an algorithm to choose your brand ambassadors
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. […]
Read More… from Why I don’t sign up to new online ad networks in a hurry
With the Twitter advertising preference monster continuing to gather preferences on all of us even after opting out—which basically makes Twitter Facebook—I decided to switch the Mastodon–Twitter Crossposter around. With Twitter being my main social network, I was quite happy to allow the Crossposter to take my Tweets and turn them into Toots on […]
Read More… from Mastodon before Twitter: time to change my main social network
There are websites such as CBS News in the US that no longer let us here in New Zealand view them. US Auto Trader is another one. It’s a damned shame, because I feel it’s a stab at the heart of what made the internet great—the fact that we could be in touch with each […]
Read More… from The “fortress America” approach to the internet fuels piracy