9 ms·

Google Will Pay Publishers for ‘The Night of the Yellow Ad’

128 points by potench 8y ago

tehlike 8y ago
Nothing newsworthy. This is part of day to day operation, just another postmortem for someone.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  Pretty lucky windfall for a bunch of people though :)
- potench 8y ago
  Saw a huge spike in CPM metrics yesterday and freaked out because it was timed near a deployment. Team chased it down to Triplelift network bidding $26 CPM over millions of impressions but Adx winning 90% of the auctions anyways, presumably with the same creative. Anyways, I found the article very informative because we weren’t sure what happened, it was such an anomaly we thought all our data was bad for the day, but it turned out to be an early Christmas present I guess. Postmortems of things that affect a ton of businessses and people seem newsworthy to me. And while this isn’t a very detailed one, it’s more information than I could find anywhere else - we assumed it was a costly fat finger mistake.
  - tehlike 8y ago
    I have seen faulty bids internally that are magnitudes larger.
  - dabei 8y ago
    It's funny Triplelift was even bidding that much. Maybe some publishers have detected the issue before it was known and milked it with ad networks.
ginko 8y ago
Made me think of an art project in a shopping street in Vienna over 10 years ago where all advertisements and logos were covered by yellow foil. I remember quite liking it back in the day. https://www.fontblog.de/fontblog-archiv/C1716572149/E945416216/Media/EntschriftungQTVR.jpg https://www.fontblog.de/fontblog-archiv/C1716572149/E9454162... http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html
- Erwin 8y ago
  Sao Paulo made that into law, banning outdoor advertising: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
  - superlopuh 8y ago
    Moscow introduced a similar design code in the city centre, it's unrecognisable from 5 years ago: http://www.artlebedev.com/moscow/design-code/ http://www.artlebedev.com/moscow/design-code/
isostatic 8y ago
2 cents per advert and the would explodes. That’s what your mental health is worth chaps.
- Tade0 8y ago
  I wonder if solving captchas to train neural networks would be less annoying and more valuable in the long run? All in all that's how the exact addresses were mapped in Google Maps.
- Phemist 8y ago
  One thing I find consistently underwhelming is how much money is actually being paid for individual ad locations, both digital and especially physical space. Ie, a sizeable city's public space being fully plastered with (nowadays animated) ads _might_ add 1% to the city's spending budget, but even that number seems high, and the proportionality is totally screwed between the public benefits and downsides.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    What's the downside? It's not like they removed artwork from the subway wall in order to cover it with ads. I get that some people don't like seeing ads but there's all sorts of public infrastructure that people would rather not look at.
    - kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
      Most other public infrastructure doesn't try to make you unhappy or manipulate your desires in every aspect of your life. Edit: I wish there was some sort of go-to essay on how and why advertising is bad, backed by academic sources. It would make arguing against ubiquitous ads just a bit easier.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        >Most other public infrastructure doesn't try to make you unhappy or manipulate your desires in every aspect of your life. Taxes make me unhappy and yes, all sorts of things the government does, many of them related to infrastructure are designed to manipulate people at scale. Often it's manipulation for "the greater good". Sometimes it's not. Having my infrastructure subsidized slightly more by ads and less by taxes makes me less unhappy. Advertising on public space is highly unobtrusive, like a banner ad compared to some JS advert that covers the whole canvas and tries to trick you into clicking it. The overwhelming majority of of advertisement is irrelevant to any given person. I'm not in the market for ED pills, high end vodka or student loan refinancing. When it's irrelevant like that it's just white noise. If I do see something relevant them maybe I'll look into it and maybe exchange my money for whatever is being sold and it's a win for both parties. Paying for infrastructure is a necessary evil. That money has to come from somewhere. Ads are a fundamentally less evil way of satisfying that necessity than taxes. Also, the ads on the subway have never tried to run malicious code on me and don't report my metadata to Google/FB/the NSA/etc.
homero 8y ago
So what was the mistake? Why pay full price when it's worth the lower bid that would have won anyway?
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Googles ad market is a 2nd price auction - ie. the winner of the auction pays the price of the runner up. Many auctions only have a single bidder, and in this case, the price is a 'reserve' price set by the publisher (website). That is common in ad slots which have strict targeting criteria banning nearly everyone else from being eligible. In those cases, often the advertiser sets a super high bid, just to make sure they win the auction. Assuming the eligibility criteria keep all other bidders out, that's not an issue. It looks like what happened here is the 'Yellow Ad' found a way to be eligible for far more auctions than normal, and had a very high bid. That meant it was now a 2nd bidder in lots of auctions where the price was normally set by the 'reserve' price, and the final hammer price was much higher.
  - deckar01 8y ago
    Thanks for the insight. I still don't fully understand the point of the article. It seems to be focused on publishers getting to keep the extra ad revenue. Does that mean the advertisers don't get a refund for their overpriced ads?
    - erichurkman 8y ago
      I took it to mean that Google was covering the advertiser's cost to the publishers that showed the ad mistakenly.
      - elliekelly 8y ago
        I read it that way too which was interesting to me. What about Google's actual clients: the advertisers who lost out on clicks/traffic because a fake ad took their place. I guess I'm surprised Google would bend over backwards to keep the platforms happy but shrug off the impact of the error on the people who ultimately pay them. Perhaps it's indicative of where the power lies in the internet advertising chain: whoever it is that can generate clicks.
bochoh 8y ago
What's amazing to me is that so many people clicked on what would otherwise be an ignored ad space.
- Theodores 8y ago
  I am annoyed that I missed out on the opportunity to do so. Running ad-blockers has its downsides. Incidentally, we have archive evidence of print adverts and they tell as much about how we used to live as what old newspapers do. With digital adverts there is no trace or evidence that the adverts ever existed. Different times, different attitudes. The rash of crypto-currency adverts from last year promising untold wealth would look utterly crazy at any other time than then. Someone needs to save the adverts - including yellow squares - for posterity.
- tossaccount123 8y ago
  Extremely high click-through-rate isn't good generally. I can make something very vague and get high CTR but the conversion will be awful and a waste of money. For an awareness or cost per impression campaign it would be good though. Compared to the average display ad the bright yellow grabs attention and "The night of the yellow ad" makes you curious
gcb0 8y ago
"google" will pay? or google will take their fat share from all their advertising clients who will pay the extra price since the floor price suddenly jumped to $20 across the board? seems like an elaborated scam within google to bump q4 revenue. someone really wanted their bonus I guess.
- odonnellryan 8y ago
  Is everything a conspiracy to you?
- phailhaus 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that Google decided to risk the trust they've built over decades (worth billions) for a one-time infusion of a few million dollars?
  - gcb0 8y ago
    no. and not conspiracy. just belive that they did the math and found out they can get the PR and a profit :)
    - phailhaus 8y ago
      This is the funniest explanation I've ever heard. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world worth hundreds of billions of dollars, their name is literally a household verb for searching, and you think they need PR? Sorry, this was obviously an accident that cost them ten million dollars. They are not going to orchestrate a stunt that makes them look incompetent.
      - JetSpiegel 8y ago
        > They are not going to orchestrate a stunt that makes them look incompetent. Speaking of the other Google story on the main page as we speak... https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-duo-and-hangouts/ https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-al...

128 points by potench 8y ago

tehlike 8y ago

Nothing newsworthy. This is part of day to day operation, just another postmortem for someone.

scarejunba 8y ago
Pretty lucky windfall for a bunch of people though :)
potench 8y ago
Saw a huge spike in CPM metrics yesterday and freaked out because it was timed near a deployment. Team chased it down to Triplelift network bidding $26 CPM over millions of impressions but Adx winning 90% of the auctions anyways, presumably with the same creative. Anyways, I found the article very informative because we weren’t sure what happened, it was such an anomaly we thought all our data was bad for the day, but it turned out to be an early Christmas present I guess. Postmortems of things that affect a ton of businessses and people seem newsworthy to me. And while this isn’t a very detailed one, it’s more information than I could find anywhere else - we assumed it was a costly fat finger mistake.
- tehlike 8y ago
  I have seen faulty bids internally that are magnitudes larger.
- dabei 8y ago
  It's funny Triplelift was even bidding that much. Maybe some publishers have detected the issue before it was known and milked it with ad networks.

ginko 8y ago

Made me think of an art project in a shopping street in Vienna over 10 years ago where all advertisements and logos were covered by yellow foil. I remember quite liking it back in the day. https://www.fontblog.de/fontblog-archiv/C1716572149/E945416216/Media/EntschriftungQTVR.jpg https://www.fontblog.de/fontblog-archiv/C1716572149/E9454162... http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html http://dativ.at/fotos/panoramas/neubaugasse.html

Erwin 8y ago
Sao Paulo made that into law, banning outdoor advertising: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
- superlopuh 8y ago
  Moscow introduced a similar design code in the city centre, it's unrecognisable from 5 years ago: http://www.artlebedev.com/moscow/design-code/ http://www.artlebedev.com/moscow/design-code/

isostatic 8y ago

2 cents per advert and the would explodes. That’s what your mental health is worth chaps.

Tade0 8y ago
I wonder if solving captchas to train neural networks would be less annoying and more valuable in the long run? All in all that's how the exact addresses were mapped in Google Maps.
Phemist 8y ago
One thing I find consistently underwhelming is how much money is actually being paid for individual ad locations, both digital and especially physical space. Ie, a sizeable city's public space being fully plastered with (nowadays animated) ads _might_ add 1% to the city's spending budget, but even that number seems high, and the proportionality is totally screwed between the public benefits and downsides.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  What's the downside? It's not like they removed artwork from the subway wall in order to cover it with ads. I get that some people don't like seeing ads but there's all sorts of public infrastructure that people would rather not look at.
  - kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
    Most other public infrastructure doesn't try to make you unhappy or manipulate your desires in every aspect of your life. Edit: I wish there was some sort of go-to essay on how and why advertising is bad, backed by academic sources. It would make arguing against ubiquitous ads just a bit easier.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      >Most other public infrastructure doesn't try to make you unhappy or manipulate your desires in every aspect of your life. Taxes make me unhappy and yes, all sorts of things the government does, many of them related to infrastructure are designed to manipulate people at scale. Often it's manipulation for "the greater good". Sometimes it's not. Having my infrastructure subsidized slightly more by ads and less by taxes makes me less unhappy. Advertising on public space is highly unobtrusive, like a banner ad compared to some JS advert that covers the whole canvas and tries to trick you into clicking it. The overwhelming majority of of advertisement is irrelevant to any given person. I'm not in the market for ED pills, high end vodka or student loan refinancing. When it's irrelevant like that it's just white noise. If I do see something relevant them maybe I'll look into it and maybe exchange my money for whatever is being sold and it's a win for both parties. Paying for infrastructure is a necessary evil. That money has to come from somewhere. Ads are a fundamentally less evil way of satisfying that necessity than taxes. Also, the ads on the subway have never tried to run malicious code on me and don't report my metadata to Google/FB/the NSA/etc.

homero 8y ago

So what was the mistake? Why pay full price when it's worth the lower bid that would have won anyway?

londons_explore 8y ago
Googles ad market is a 2nd price auction - ie. the winner of the auction pays the price of the runner up. Many auctions only have a single bidder, and in this case, the price is a 'reserve' price set by the publisher (website). That is common in ad slots which have strict targeting criteria banning nearly everyone else from being eligible. In those cases, often the advertiser sets a super high bid, just to make sure they win the auction. Assuming the eligibility criteria keep all other bidders out, that's not an issue. It looks like what happened here is the 'Yellow Ad' found a way to be eligible for far more auctions than normal, and had a very high bid. That meant it was now a 2nd bidder in lots of auctions where the price was normally set by the 'reserve' price, and the final hammer price was much higher.
- deckar01 8y ago
  Thanks for the insight. I still don't fully understand the point of the article. It seems to be focused on publishers getting to keep the extra ad revenue. Does that mean the advertisers don't get a refund for their overpriced ads?
  - erichurkman 8y ago
    I took it to mean that Google was covering the advertiser's cost to the publishers that showed the ad mistakenly.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      I read it that way too which was interesting to me. What about Google's actual clients: the advertisers who lost out on clicks/traffic because a fake ad took their place. I guess I'm surprised Google would bend over backwards to keep the platforms happy but shrug off the impact of the error on the people who ultimately pay them. Perhaps it's indicative of where the power lies in the internet advertising chain: whoever it is that can generate clicks.

bochoh 8y ago

What's amazing to me is that so many people clicked on what would otherwise be an ignored ad space.

Theodores 8y ago
I am annoyed that I missed out on the opportunity to do so. Running ad-blockers has its downsides. Incidentally, we have archive evidence of print adverts and they tell as much about how we used to live as what old newspapers do. With digital adverts there is no trace or evidence that the adverts ever existed. Different times, different attitudes. The rash of crypto-currency adverts from last year promising untold wealth would look utterly crazy at any other time than then. Someone needs to save the adverts - including yellow squares - for posterity.
tossaccount123 8y ago
Extremely high click-through-rate isn't good generally. I can make something very vague and get high CTR but the conversion will be awful and a waste of money. For an awareness or cost per impression campaign it would be good though. Compared to the average display ad the bright yellow grabs attention and "The night of the yellow ad" makes you curious

gcb0 8y ago

"google" will pay? or google will take their fat share from all their advertising clients who will pay the extra price since the floor price suddenly jumped to $20 across the board? seems like an elaborated scam within google to bump q4 revenue. someone really wanted their bonus I guess.

odonnellryan 8y ago
Is everything a conspiracy to you?
phailhaus 8y ago
Are you suggesting that Google decided to risk the trust they've built over decades (worth billions) for a one-time infusion of a few million dollars?
- gcb0 8y ago
  no. and not conspiracy. just belive that they did the math and found out they can get the PR and a profit :)
  - phailhaus 8y ago
    This is the funniest explanation I've ever heard. Google is one of the biggest companies in the world worth hundreds of billions of dollars, their name is literally a household verb for searching, and you think they need PR? Sorry, this was obviously an accident that cost them ten million dollars. They are not going to orchestrate a stunt that makes them look incompetent.
    - JetSpiegel 8y ago
      > They are not going to orchestrate a stunt that makes them look incompetent. Speaking of the other Google story on the main page as we speak... https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-duo-and-hangouts/ https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-al...