10 Feb 2026 Search

In Speaking Out, Brian Jacobs says it’s time to speak out.

We should be asking the platforms, and their representatives at the IAB (also on stage at LEAD) questions around content and regulations whenever we get the chance, and especially at our industry’s top events. Not to do so is to avoid responsibility; to be complicit.

And he covers some recent news from the advertising duopoly. The kind of thing that the advertiser who send their money to the Big Tech companies should be asking about.

But raising a stink about this stuff might not be speaking truth to power so much as pointing out flaws in something that’s already precarious. Google and Meta already have about half the ad money, but advertising grows about as fast as the economy does, and investors expect Google and Meta to keep growing at double-digit rates. The flood of decisions to keep doing more crimes, faster, is sounding more and more like desperation. What if the “content and regulation” issues are part of an increasingly frantic scramble for short-term revenue?

META’s Security Policy Manager, Rita Amin, said that the extent of revenues from scam ads had been exaggerated, without being pushed to explain what they were planning on doing with the $4bn or so admitted to (it seems unlikely any will be going to the vulnerable suffering from the worst excesses on their platforms).

But it’s not four billion, or ten billion, or sixteen, or whatever. Meta ads are based on an internal auction, so the extra scam bidders drive up the price for every advertiser. I’m sure that Meta has an internal simulation where they can re-run some impressions without the scammers in the mix, so they know how much extra they’re pulling in from each big agency because the scammers are present. And I’m pretty sure that it will come out in discovery at some point. There’s too much money at stake for a class action to not happen.if someone made a Groklaw-like site for that case it would be like an advanced class in market design—I would subscribe.

While Meta tweaks their system to get more money from advertisers, and displays a creepy need to keep up teenage usage, Google’s metrics hacks are a scheme to work the other side, and pay out less to content creators. Stars tend to emerge in any entertainment medium, but fame means a person can build market power and the ability to negotiate a bigger piece of the action. So an algorithmic feed can tweak what users see to prevent stars from emerging and capture a bigger share of revenue from commoditized content. But that only works if YouTube can stay undifferentiated, and not let advertisers and rising stars see each other. This measurement blocking is the kind of shenanigans they wouldn’t have to pull if they were getting a fair piece of the action from a fair deal between advertiser and YouTuber.

With all this stuff going on, at some point, the cost of getting a new customer using Google and/or Meta gets to be unsustainable, so agencies and brands have to come up with something else. Starting by telling the truth about today’s issues can’t hurt.