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AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoOn one side: Net neutrality is dead, so you can see where AT&T might see a future for expanding their advertising business. But on the other side: Between GDPR and the constant calls for the US to adopt something similar, the default integration of ad blockers into more browsers, and the fact that targeted advertising just... isn't all that effective, it seems like a poor business to start investing in now.
- poooogles 8y ago>it seems like a poor business to start investing in now. Allegedly they're buying it to integrate into their TV offerings. There's a huge market there that's relatively untapped at the moment compared to Display so it makes some sense.
- tehwebguy 8y agoAT&T owns the legislative & regulatory bodies that would enact something like GDRP in the US. They aren’t worried.
- tzahola 8y ago>default integration of ad blockers into more browsers Good idea! The only way this could fail is if some huge advertising company had created their own browser and became dominant on the market. We would be so screwed! XD
- tehwebguy 8y agoThis is incredibly disturbing, they need not inject a unique ID like Verizon’s, they can now do it all on the backend.
- rectang 8y agoWhen I went to start streaming the world cup, AT&T took the initiative to "sign me in" to a third party (Fox) without asking for credentials or permission. They know who you are. They know everywhere you go. And they are happy to spread what they know about you around.
- aslkdjaslkdj1 8y agoHave you used your login for any other TV service? The OTT industry has settled on a pretty broad single sign-on ecosystem. If you've logged into any OTT service with your crendentials, you likely don't need to do it again for any other service. https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-up-46-single-sign-adobe-says https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-up-46...
- rectang 8y agoNo. I've got Firefox configured to nuke almost everything on restart, plus I run PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin. This is not me overlooking an existing login. (I also run a site-specific browsers via Chrome to isolate my Gmail login and keep Google from knowing who I am, I have no Facebook login, etc. I'm not serious enough to run a VPN or Tor, and my setup isn't enough to guard against browser fingerprinting, but I'm reasonably paranoid.)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ghein 8y agoIf they're your ISP they own you. Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID. But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but no impediment to other.
- majormajor 8y agoWhen I used AT&T TV+internet a few months ago, this was still the old-style "click here to auth with your cable provider" -> [click the AT&T Uverse button] -> "thanks!" (they recognized I was on a hardwired AT&T connection so didn't require auth). Is this something new? What was the flow? Do you have both AT&T internet + TV as well?
- pandasun 8y agoHonestly, at this point I'm just waiting for the internet to implode so we can start something better. No more signing 'petitions' for me, which go straight to whatever senator's trash.
- AboutTheWhisles 8y agoOr we could work to make sure that traffic is always encrypted. Solving the ISP knowing who your packets are going to is more difficult, but no longer having clear data passing back and forth should have been a solved problem by now.
- dangerlibrary 8y agoWell, since ISPs are now free to sell / monetize consumer traffic data [0], this makes some sense. They are pretty desperate for ways to be something more than a dumb pipe for other's content. [0] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary
- trumped 8y agothey were always free to do that...
- dangerlibrary 8y agoAbsence (with the threat of regulation) is a very different state than an explicit ban on regulation (via the CRA) and what amounts to a governmental endorsement of their move into ad tech. You're correct that the rules never went into effect, but they also had no reason to invest in ad tech with the (increasingly probable) regulation looming in the future.
- potatote 8y agoLast year, AT&T hired Brian Lesser, the former CEO of GroupM/WPP. They have been planning to enter the digital marketing as a player for a while now.
- JaimeThompson 8y agoAnd just this morning I received a text from AT&T that said, in part, "Your privacy comes first, as always." I wonder if they are getting their definition of privacy from the same place they get their definition of unlimited?
- gumby 8y agoI think they mean the first thing they target is your privacy.
- AboutTheWhisles 8y agoI would hate to see how bad they are at whatever comes second.
- soared 8y agoThere should be some decent commentary from industry people on r/adops: https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquire_appnexus_for_16_billion/ https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquir... https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_lesser_on_the_future_of_advertising/ https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_le...
- asafira 8y agoExtra props for including "old." there.
- coastal-fiesta 8y agoWhy the dislike of the new interface?
- allthenews 8y agoPersonally I feel it is optimized for constant dopamine and advertisement, at the cost of content density. Previously, I could navigate to a subreddit, relatively quickly glance at whether anything was new, without being distracted by autoloading images and videos. Now reddit looks more like ebaumsworld 10 years ago.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoPersonally: 1. Clicking on a link now takes you to the comments page, instead of the destination. To get to the destination, you need to hunt down the "direct" link. This is a shitty pattern. 2. The spacing is all weird. I just don't like the design aestheticially. But it might just be "it's different and therefore bad". 3. A lot of features aren't yet implemented on the new platform. (Crossposting, at least.) 4. Some content that I want available immediately (my multis) are loaded asynchronously, forcing me to wait before I can actually go to where I want. 5. Infinite scroll can fuck off and die in a fire. It's less of an issue on reddit, where bookmarking a given page doesn't really make sense anyway, but in principle I want my content paginated so I can have a sense of how much I've seen so far. 6. Collapsing threads is now slightly more annoying than it was, although it might be another case of "new and different therefore bad". Some of these aren't really relevant to a link to a specific thread from outside reddit.
- Azerb 8y agoSo as someone getting AT&T Fiber this week, what VPNs should I look at using?
- Rjevski 8y agoMake your own with a box in AWS or any other cloud provider running something like Strongswan on Linux or iked on OpenBSD. All the out of the box VPNs I've found have some shortcomings, either being horribly insecure (PPTP, seriously?), overpriced, often abused (which means their entire subnet is banned by pretty much everything) and the providers sometimes seem shady (I want a VPN to escape cancer aka ads, not the government - in this case I'd actually prefer something akin to an ISP complying with local laws versus a "bulletproof" one who could very well be a fly-by-night operation up to no good).
- iooi 8y agoHave you taken a look at algo[1]? Dead simple to set up on AWS. [1] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
- Azerb 8y agoSounds great, I'll do my research and get to work.
- e1ven 8y agoI've found that a lot of typical residential traffic (Netflix) is blocked when routing through datacenters. I'd love to hear your experience.
- Rjevski 8y agoI don't have any issues with Netflix on either Linode or Digital Ocean personally.
- ghein 8y agoLots of gaming traffic is also banned. People use AWS for malicious purposes (usually free tier) and then the IP gets recycled, eventually, to a legitimate user. Popular cloud hosts with a freemium option are a bad idea for personal vpn.
- charleyma 8y agoInteresting answer to Verizon's acquisition of AOL + Yahoo, until all the recent acquisitions I (naively) just assumed ISP's revenue was primary from selling services (cable, internet, tv, data, etc) and reselling the data somehow, but did not connect that they're all very much in adtech...
- mcny 8y agoI am more surprised to see Oracle in adtech. I assumed ATT would want a piece of the pie when I read about Verizon's supercookies. I think I still fail to grasp the size of the ad tech/marketing industry. I know it is big but I think it is bigger than I can comprehend.
- paulsutter 8y agoBig congrats to Brian OKelley and Michael Rubenstein
- hari_seldon_ 8y agoWith IPO rumors existing for at least 4 years and a price under $2B, is this a good exit for the company’s leadership and employees? (Understanding that an exit is better than nothing at all!)
- jaklfdjkasf 8y agoHopefully it's a congrats to the employees as well, but startups rarely reward the employees that do all the hard work.
- mathattack 8y agoWow. Wow. Wow. Part of me is terrified that someone who has all my details just bought a firm that can trad on them. (It’s economic magic though - as if the Federal Reserve bought a hedge fund) But part of me says that when one dinosaur buys another, the end result is rarely Excellence. I suspect that this will wind up a disaster and write-off.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoBeen blocking ads for years pretty thoroughly. Its a trillion $ industry that might as well not exist really. My advice: buy an unlocked Android phone. Throw DNS66 on it to block in app ads. Use browsers that support ublock origin, I advise Fennec which is Firefox for Android stripped of the Mozilla crap. You are not a powerless victim, you have agency.
- le-mark 8y agoHow is Fennec on the battery life? I tried firefox on android several years ago and uninstalled immediately due to battery consumption. Has that story changed?
- chadmeister 8y agoI'd recommend giving Firefox another shot. It's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was on mobile more than a year ago.
- alfredallan1 8y agoThere ought to be some sort of regulation preventing this sort of thing - like the Glass-Steagall Act in banking that mandated separation of investment banking and commercial banking operations.
- mathattack 8y agoGS was created so an implosion on the banking side didn’t kill our savings accounts. In general antitrust is more about preventing Coke from buying Pepsi than Coke buying It’s bottlers or Kroger. The idea was vertical integration isn’t as harmful on consumer prices as horizontal. I think in this case it’s more about something like GDPR.
- pasbesoin 8y agoMore and more "vertical integration". And, with the current FCC, I expect more forced "channeling" of customers/users into said integration. I wrote Congress regarding net neutrality. I got one response -- and that not from my own representatives. And, despite my pointing this behavior out in my original letter, it just continued to shill the ATT, Comcast, Verizon, et al. talking points. Right now, at home, on the connection Comcast just raised the monthly cost of by circa 30% since the beginning of this year, I'm using a VPN to keep their nose (and JS injection) out of my business. I reiterate: We need a competing physical layer. One that we keep from getting likewise co-opted.
- a2tech 8y agoWell this is horrifying.
- hughlang 8y agoThis reminds me of all those times that Yahoo bought advertising networks and tools.
- trumped 8y agoThe unaccounted for $0.4B goes to bonuses for CEOs? /s
- lukego 8y agoSounds like a bargain to acquihire pkhuong... https://www.pvk.ca/ https://www.pvk.ca/ ;-)
- sanjayar 8y agotoo late.
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoI would hate to be an ATT customer.