12 Aug 2023 Search

As far as I can tell, any advertising medium is like a game with five kinds of players in it.

  • users: seeking the greatest possible value in (ad-supported content + economic signal) in exchange for (attention/interruption + computing resources + risk). This does not necessarily mean seeking the least possible amount of advertising. See Vogue and Computer Shopper.

  • legit advertisers: seeking to maximize return on ad spend, which can include direct response metrics and/or reputation/brand equity

  • deceptive advertisers: similar to legit advertisers, but the difference is that they don’t want the brand equity because it would tend to go negative.

  • legit publishers: produce original ad-supported content that pays its way for users.

  • deceptive publishers: produce ad-supported content that either does not pay its way for users (costs more in attention, resources and risk than it’s worth) or takes from some other party without compensation (such as copyright infringement).

Sometimes an ad medium has qualities that give an advantage to some categories of players but not others. I don’t know exactly what those qualities are, but there is some interesting literature that might help to figure them out.

When an ad medium is implemented in software, the hard part is to design the rules in order to give an advantage to the legit players. And this is really hard. Today’s search, social, and web RTB advertising are giving persistent advantages to deceptive players. And just hiring a bunch of ad reviewers to chase down the deceptive players is not going to work. If the rules of the market are laid down so that they give an advantage to deceptive players, then any deceptive player who can get their costs down below the cost of finding and blocking them is going to keep at it.