11 ms·

Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain

208 points by ksajadi 7y ago

samdung 7y ago
Finally, someone is talking sense about these shitty Taboola, Outbrain clickbait ads. I have all the reputed news sites asking me to disable adblockers only to be shown the scum links from Taboola and Outbrain. Most times ads from Taboola and Outbrain keep showing up even when i specifically disable those divs.
- noneeeed 7y ago
  I am constantly surprised how many "reputable" sites stick these bottom-feeders on their page. I feel like it must impact readers' perception of those sites when they are trying to be all highbrow, and then the bottom of an article is stuffed with crap that most tabloids wouldn't publish.
  - joaodlf 7y ago
    Because they have bills and wages to pay. They more than likely have tried different methods of monetisation as well, it just didn't work as well. Which is why this field is in dire need fir reinvention. It's terrible, but it works. The challenge is making it work, without being terrible.
    - mevile 7y ago
      > Because they have bills and wages to pay. That's a rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things. It's never good enough to excuse the behavior. It's a terrible product, a terrible experience, and nobody benefits from it except these companies and the people responsible for revenue at whatever publisher is infested with these ads. I work at an ad supported site, we trialed these things and I'm sure that any of the journalists at places that have these things hate this crap as much as their users do but they don't have any say over its inclusion. It's some finance person, running the numbers.
      - joaodlf 7y ago
        So what should the "finance" person do? Stop thinking in a financial way? Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too. These ads are there because they work, savvy users might not like them, you don't, I don't. It's time for new players to step up and disrupt this market, but not if that means a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.
        majewsky 7y ago
        The "finance person" should start thinking beyond the current quarter, and recognize the long-term damage they're inflicting on their brand by associating it with shitty garbage content.
        kabwj 7y ago
        If you are forced to resort to these things to survive maybe you should do something else. Maybe these journalists should learn to code.
        mean_jean 7y ago
        I'm a coder journalists. I could make a lot more outside of journalism but I believe in the mission as do the traditional journalists. We don't just like having jobs - we do it because our democracy and society wouldn't work as well without it. Sometimes there are trade offs made to pay the bills so we can do the work that matters. It's not ideal but the whole industry is just trying to keep their heads above water right now.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Grow a backbone? We're not talking about whether the CTA button should be light blue or dark blue. We're talking about decision to unleash some of the worst garbage Internet has on unsuspecting and unwilling people. It hurts individuals, and drags down both the industry and the society at large. Someone in the company should be able to say "no" to that. The author of the article described some of the consequences, strongly implying but stopping short of saying one thing out loud, so I'll say it here: chumboxes are unethical products, and showing chumboxes is unethical behaviour too. (But yeah, I do understand competitive pressure. That's why I hope we eventually get around to killing Taboola and friends through regulatory means.)
    - baud147258 7y ago
      The shit quality of Taboola ads made reenable my adblock on one of the only website where I had disabled it. I couldn't just support a website that put such crap before my eyes.
    - have_faith 7y ago
      The reason most monetisation models don't work is because the vast majority of content produced by these outlets is not worth anything. Hence why no monetisation strategy can part anyone with their money. There's nothing to reinvent.
  - JudgeWapner 7y ago
    I'm sure they use the "it's a third party, we have no control over it" defense. Whoever pays the site pays a middleman who pays a middleman who pays another middleman that loads bottom feeder ads, malware, auto playing video, and of course JS exploits.
- ing33k 7y ago
  one of the main reasons why publishers stick with them is because these networks give the publishers minimum guranteed deals.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  Can't remember which one we used, but they're terrible for engagement as well - we had to pull a native campaign as we were seeing (if not ad fraud) then utterly awful engagement rates. Average under a second time on page, lots of useless sites in the referral list, lots of "clicks". I'm guessing publishers love them as they seem to get people to click on the ads, but eventually any reputable advertisers will wise up and get out of there.
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    It's a fast narrowing funnel. Lots of advertisers try it. It works well for very few. The few campaigns that work well scale massively. That's why ads are so repetitive for users. "Advertiser" is also an overstatement as this article explains. Most are doing as arbitrage.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  I have started to simply turn of JavaScript for those sites that either give me any grief about adblockers or show gdpr opt outs.
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  It's all garbage. I don't get why anyone thinks these ads are any worse than any other online adverts. If anything, they're less creepy because they're generic clickbait and they don't appear to be tracking me or targeting me personally.
joaodlf 7y ago
The world of affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. A lot of developers won't find their nirvana here, and that's understandable, but when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems. I also believe this is an area that is still craving for real innovation and solutions. There is a lot of money to be made here, but no one has really "cracked" it yet, not truly.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver? There seems to be little legitimate money to be made and it mostly hinges on tricks & dark patterns to mislead customers into bad deals as far as they’re concerned.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    It connects consumers with products and services they might otherwise not have been made aware of, and pays the content producers' bills Sure, a lot of that content is bullshitters bullshitting about bullshit products and in the MLM world some of the bullshit "products" consist solely of instructions on how to make more affiliate links, but affiliate marketing is also how most price/feature comparison sites which are actually useful make their money, and started off as a way of getting people to take writing book reviews more seriously because they could earn a bit from linking interested readers directly to a purchase page on a new website called Amazon.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver? For most pages, I'd say very little to the customer, a lot to the merchant: the merchant can't claim things about the product for legal reasons, can't make up fake reviews/testimonials etc, so they outsource that task to the affiliate. Of course, they don't say "just claim some bullshit", but they accept that it's done, and it will be done because there's a lot of incentive to do it and none to not do it. What I'm really surprised with is the whole couponing sector of affiliate marketing. It doesn't provide any value to the merchant, because people typically look for coupons after they've decided to buy something at a specific store. You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.
tomjmarch 7y ago
So these ads are largely unobtrusive and provide an extra income stream for the WaPo - it certainly feels a bit seedy, but is this actually a bad thing?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  They are gross, stalk you across the internet and can lead to malware or scams. At least with most ads the “value” is some kind of product you can buy if you click on it. With these ads there’s no value other than showing you more ads if you click through.
- pjc50 7y ago
  They're obtrusive - disturbing images of rotting teeth, etc. Taboola and outbrain are the two places I will block at hosts file level even when not running an adblocker simply because of how ugly their ads are.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  If nothing else, I suspect it's harmful to the reputations of the news organizations hosting them, especially as they're often themed to look similar to the site. In an era of "fake news" accusations, having actual fake news right there on your home page isn't great.
ablation 7y ago
Easily one of the grubbiest forms of advertising on the web. Hollow, vapid and devoid of value other than for the advertiser. "Chum" is the right word.
shedside 7y ago
I sincerely hate these accursed things. Loathe them. Installed an ad blocker with the specific intent to rid myself of them.
- shpx 7y ago
  I hope you installed uBlock Origin and not Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin), because these people bought into the protection racket euphemistically referred to as ""Acceptable" Ads" back in late 2014 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 There's even a FAQ entry on the Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin) website (they're almost certainly the same company) > "I want to support websites I love. I just don't want to see ads from Taboola!" which is answered with > We hear you. [...] We agree that Taboola (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Outbrain) ads aren't "acceptable." We're hopeful that now that the Acceptable Ads list is under the control of that third-party board, Taboola and Outbrain will be removed from it. We encourage you to voice your opinion of Taboola ads on the Acceptable Ads forum. The Wayback machine only has it since 2018 but I think it's been there since ""acceptable" ads" was transferred to the completely-independent-and-objective-no-hidden-agenda "third-party board" in 2017. Guess what one of the oldest and the most viewed threads on the forum is about? https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/6000092027-why-does-adblock-allow-non-intrusive-ads- https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60000... Very crafty.
  - shedside 7y ago
    That's horrifying. But nah, I'm using 1Blocker.
benj111 7y ago
So what they're saying is, we follow this one simple trick? I just don't believe that.
air7 7y ago
How are they different from Adsense?
- notahacker 7y ago
  Adsense generally involves [theoretically] context-sensitive text links to regular company websites designed to look like context-sensitive ads, whereas Taboola/Outbrain generally involves a big box of fake news links of the "Secret Brain Pill Used By Millionaires" type, designed to look like a list of news content.
  - quickthrower2 7y ago
    Google are very fussy about who can advertise and what. They'll ban spammy behavior. If your content is not relevant you pay more. If your site score is low you pay more.
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
I have worked in ad tech. It was fun. These types of ads were a funny joke. I have also worked for US defense related companies. It was also fun and the tech was top notch. Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you think deeply enough. Quite a shame.
- joaodlf 7y ago
  Most people here are incapable of understanding this. HN is full of people who's work is purely good and ethical :). I would love to be able to see the world through those eyes.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you think deeply enough. Quite a shame. It is true. There are degrees - some of the jobs don't hurt others, and some that do don't do it on purpose or as a primary outcome. A company making screws and nails likely exploits only its employees. Some are taking advantage of their customers but still deliver a basic need. Think grocery stores that like to screw with food quality to the limit allowed by laws and social tolerance. You don't get exactly what you think you paid for, but it won't otherwise hurt you either. Some jobs can involve hurting people, but at least have a somewhat plausible justification for it. E.g. some of the defense work can be justified by just protecting your borders and deterring attacks, and the hurt isn't realized until some external party tries to test your defenses. Then there are jobs that are purely about exploiting other people, without giving them much of value. A lot of advertising is this. Chumboxes, telemarketing, e-mail spam, native advertising, retargeting... I could go on. It all essentially boils down to treating human beings as exploitable resources - bags with money that you get to squeeze out by applying psychological pressure. It does feel very much like factory farming. (Yes, this post is sorted in descending order of what I think about occupations. Yes, I think defense companies can be morally superior to advertisers. The former help maintain a bubble of law and order in which we can happily live. The latter exist to screw our lives up.)
  - joaodlf 7y ago
    Whatever makes people sleep at night :).
pjc50 7y ago
So I was idly wondering whether the UK Advertising Standards Authority had had a runin with these people, and found surprisingly few examples. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-srl-a16-335037.html https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-srl-a16-335037... mug with "C" handle and "UNT" body, banned https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-advertising.html https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-... Ruling on "native advertising", mentions Outbrain ruling https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-Inc-A13-251818.html https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-Inc-A13-251818.html
- dalbasal 7y ago
  UK ASA, is fairly toothless in general. Where they have leverage is with TV (which submit semi-voluntarily) or where the advertiser is regulated by another body, like financial services, pharmaceuticals or gambling. In these cases, the regulators can and do hand out fines based on ASA results. It seems like their website isn't displaying all the rulings though.
k1m 7y ago
Here's Adblock Plus adding Taboola to their "Acceptable Ads" programme to allow those ads to show - enabled by default when you install it: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 If you haven't already switched, please install and encourage others to install uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- mises 7y ago
  From my anecdotal experience, ublock origin is also faster. This is apparently backed up by at least some testing: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/ https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested...
  - ohashi 7y ago
    adblock plus is a protection racket iirc.
hope_canyon 7y ago
I interviewed for a role at outbrain as like a... Junior account manager or something, before retraining as a Dev. So glad i missed that noise. I was a tester at an agency and that was ok and worked on some cool stuff... But this would not have been my speed at all. I didn't really know much about outbrain when I interviewed for the job, what an eye opening article.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Always do cursory research first! There are people that unknowingly work for adware trojan companies.
alex_young 7y ago
Here's what I don't get: What is being exchanged of value here? In all but one case in this analysis, the only thing that is worth something is the click. A click not leading to a credit card transaction. Take the case of the 5G ad. If you convince a user to click on that and then on one of the ads on the google results, someone gets $10. Nothing of value unless the user also has interest in the super specialized networking equipment being sold, something that seems extraordinarily unlikely. This is a form of fraud isn't it? You're just putting a few million page views in the mix and calling it legitimate behavior when someone accidentally clicks once in a while.
- amitport 7y ago
  I wouldn't assume ad owners are stupid (maybe sometimes) Generally, they know what those few million page views value is. A direct method could be to pause the campaign for a while and see how it effects a metric that matters to them. (if they don't have such metric, then yeah... they're a little stupid)
- dwighttk 7y ago
  Someone eventually either buys something, or the company that's paying for the last, most expensive, click goes out of business. But there's a lot of those companies, so there's always (so far) someone paying for those clicks.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    (goes out of business or just stops buying those ads...)
  - alex_young 7y ago
    In this view, the sucker is the VC? I'm not saying that's wrong, but wow.
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      probably also some small businesspeople of the herbalife/lululemon type...
blueboo 7y ago
A decade of free online news subsidized by the dying gasp of the news industry has set us up perfectly for this. Going forward, that subsidization will finish evaporating and the only news media that can earn ad dollars will be either sponsored content or have chum strewn across them. Buy gold, miracle cures, payday loan, t&a. Expect the chum to be optimized, enhanced, and enriched.
- Kadin 7y ago
  Or, you know, stuff people are willing to pay for. WaPo and NYT, among others, have seemingly done okay after paywalling their content (with admittedly relaxed rules to preserve inbound hits from Google, Twitter, etc.). The real problem is the lack of a payments infrastructure that doesn't have tremendously high fees for small amounts, especially small recurring payments. I'm willing to pay for a WaPo subscription upfront, for a year, and that makes the credit card fees acceptable on their end. But the amount I'm willing to pay for other sites is smaller, and that probably makes it prohibitive for them to accept credit cards directly, and there's no other good standard way of getting paid. Ironically Google is in the best position to do micropayments (hell they could even do impression-based micropayments!) because it's not too dissimilar from their ad-revenue billing. But of course they won't, because they're an advertising company. But the faster we kill ads, which basically means the more people who use adblockers, the more market pressure will be created for someone to act as a clearinghouse for small payments between content creators and consumers. And the stuff that people aren't willing to pay for, won't be created, or will be created only if it's someone's hobby or scratches their creative itch.
mehlmao 7y ago
A few years ago I got really into the (ad-supported) solitaire game included with Windows 10. I wasn't really surprised that almost all the ads were Outbrain/Taboola type chum, targeted at senior citizens. I was surprised that almost all of the ads were scams, promising 0% interest mortgage refinancing or threatening that you could lose your Medicare benefits, etc. I wonder why we haven't seen backlash towards companies hosting obviously malicious ads.
hnitbanalns 7y ago
Must have been sponsored by revcontent.com
cm2012 7y ago
Taboola and Outbrain type ads are what you get when you don't have good ad targeting available. FB and Instagram ads are much higher quality because of the targeting FB offers.
onemoresoop 7y ago
Taboola and Outbrain are everywhere. They pretend to be: "Taboola and outbrain are clearly filling a need in the market. There is a gap between what publishers can monetize through their existing direct and remnant channels, which outbrain and taboola help fill. They also provide the sites with deeper engagement by cross linking related content that people are likely to read." That was funny.. With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked with Israeli intelligence and do more than just provide third party advertising. To me it is a good idea to block them off.
- Shekelberg 7y ago
  > With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked with Israeli intelligence That sure is interesting. In fact, all three of the clickbait companies (Taboola, Outbrain, and Wazimo) mentioned in the article are founded and run by Israelis. What are the odds of that? It's quite a coincidence just how often companies involved in scams and unethical behavior just happen to be run by an ethnic group that makes up 0.2% of the world population.
- huac 7y ago
  I saw that they are Israeli companies, but what ties do they have to Israeli intelligence (beyond, I suppose, that their Israeli employees had previously done mandatory military service)?
- amitport 7y ago
  They are not "both linked with Israeli intelligence". Do note though that Google, Facebook, apple, did disclose that they work in collaboration with the US intelligence.
air7 7y ago
An interesting ethical question is who in the supply chain is responsible for the chum content, and how much. Lets assume an ad is an out-right scam of some sort. The advertiser is obviously guilty, but is the ad aggregate to blame (outbrain yes, adsense no)? The hosting website? (no, but their reputation should be affected). The CDN (no, and cloudflare's attempt was censorship), The hosting company or the domain registrar or my ISP (no) Maybe the browser itself or the OS or my router (no) or the adblocker failing to block the ad (yes, if it was via acceptable ads). There are many (more) players in the "supply chain" yet we perceive their respective responsibility differently, perhaps arbitrarily. I wrote my gut reactions in parenthesis above, but I can't see a strong rational behind my own sentiments.
troyvit 7y ago
I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better. Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content, but until the world finds a successful way for people to pay up for what they enjoy it's what the industry has to work with. That out of the way I have a few issues with this piece. 1. Ranjan did an interesting thing that chum purveyors like us do all the time. He lead the article with a disturbing screenshot of the lowest piece of crap chum he could find. That draws you in to read more because who wouldn't stare at a train wreck right? What he didn't say is that the screenshot he showed isn't an Outbrain widget. In fact almost every recommendation in that widget breaks Outbrain's content guidelines (https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/ https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/) and would be removed from our network. Tying those ads to Outbrain is not accurate. 2. The block of chum below the first one, with the 5G and such? Yeah totally Outbrain. Ranjan went through all the ads there and found none of them are harmful. Yeah some are vapid entertainment, one is a nonsensical link to a dying search engine, but a few of them gasp are actually useful. Somehow though the fact that people make money off of advertising is bad. 3. None of either example are worse than what you would find in the back pages of Psychology Today or Popular Science back in the day. Those publishers were as responsible for those ads back then as WaPo is for the chum at the bottom of its articles today. If you read our content guidelines you'll see that Outbrain takes that responsibility seriously. We're guests on our publishers' pages and we never forget that. I think this article could have gone a whole lot deeper into the terrifying world of ad arbitrage, programmatic buying, behavioral tracking, GDPR skirting, etc. and it would have been more meaningful, but the fact that it is complaining that these chum buckets are as bad as display advertising in the magazine era isn't really saying anything new.
flancian 7y ago
I call these arbitrash. I hate them with a passion, partly because I understand (deep down) why they continue to exist: they sometimes work on me, in the sense that they arouse the basest form of curiosity and I get the impulse of clicking on them. I like myself a little less for it, even though I never actually do it.
hakfoo 7y ago
It's about he difficulty of brands coexisting with news content. Traditional content-based and even remarketing ads are risky to run against news articles. Too many of them are depressing or controversial-- nobody wants to accidentally advertise cheap flights next to a plane crash article, or anything opposite a polarizing political piece. The chumbox advertisers, being nameless arbritrage affiliates or fly-by-night sellers, have zero brand equity. They have very little to lose if they accidentally get their ad running against the wrong message.

208 points by ksajadi 7y ago

Finally, someone is talking sense about these shitty Taboola, Outbrain clickbait ads. I have all the reputed news sites asking me to disable adblockers only to be shown the scum links from Taboola and Outbrain. Most times ads from Taboola and Outbrain keep showing up even when i specifically disable those divs.

noneeeed 7y ago
I am constantly surprised how many "reputable" sites stick these bottom-feeders on their page. I feel like it must impact readers' perception of those sites when they are trying to be all highbrow, and then the bottom of an article is stuffed with crap that most tabloids wouldn't publish.
- joaodlf 7y ago
  Because they have bills and wages to pay. They more than likely have tried different methods of monetisation as well, it just didn't work as well. Which is why this field is in dire need fir reinvention. It's terrible, but it works. The challenge is making it work, without being terrible.
  - mevile 7y ago
    > Because they have bills and wages to pay. That's a rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things. It's never good enough to excuse the behavior. It's a terrible product, a terrible experience, and nobody benefits from it except these companies and the people responsible for revenue at whatever publisher is infested with these ads. I work at an ad supported site, we trialed these things and I'm sure that any of the journalists at places that have these things hate this crap as much as their users do but they don't have any say over its inclusion. It's some finance person, running the numbers.
    - joaodlf 7y ago
      So what should the "finance" person do? Stop thinking in a financial way? Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too. These ads are there because they work, savvy users might not like them, you don't, I don't. It's time for new players to step up and disrupt this market, but not if that means a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.
      - majewsky 7y ago
        The "finance person" should start thinking beyond the current quarter, and recognize the long-term damage they're inflicting on their brand by associating it with shitty garbage content.
      - kabwj 7y ago
        If you are forced to resort to these things to survive maybe you should do something else. Maybe these journalists should learn to code.
        mean_jean 7y ago
        I'm a coder journalists. I could make a lot more outside of journalism but I believe in the mission as do the traditional journalists. We don't just like having jobs - we do it because our democracy and society wouldn't work as well without it. Sometimes there are trade offs made to pay the bills so we can do the work that matters. It's not ideal but the whole industry is just trying to keep their heads above water right now.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Grow a backbone? We're not talking about whether the CTA button should be light blue or dark blue. We're talking about decision to unleash some of the worst garbage Internet has on unsuspecting and unwilling people. It hurts individuals, and drags down both the industry and the society at large. Someone in the company should be able to say "no" to that. The author of the article described some of the consequences, strongly implying but stopping short of saying one thing out loud, so I'll say it here: chumboxes are unethical products, and showing chumboxes is unethical behaviour too. (But yeah, I do understand competitive pressure. That's why I hope we eventually get around to killing Taboola and friends through regulatory means.)
  - baud147258 7y ago
    The shit quality of Taboola ads made reenable my adblock on one of the only website where I had disabled it. I couldn't just support a website that put such crap before my eyes.
  - have_faith 7y ago
    The reason most monetisation models don't work is because the vast majority of content produced by these outlets is not worth anything. Hence why no monetisation strategy can part anyone with their money. There's nothing to reinvent.
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  I'm sure they use the "it's a third party, we have no control over it" defense. Whoever pays the site pays a middleman who pays a middleman who pays another middleman that loads bottom feeder ads, malware, auto playing video, and of course JS exploits.
ing33k 7y ago
one of the main reasons why publishers stick with them is because these networks give the publishers minimum guranteed deals.
wastedhours 7y ago
Can't remember which one we used, but they're terrible for engagement as well - we had to pull a native campaign as we were seeing (if not ad fraud) then utterly awful engagement rates. Average under a second time on page, lots of useless sites in the referral list, lots of "clicks". I'm guessing publishers love them as they seem to get people to click on the ads, but eventually any reputable advertisers will wise up and get out of there.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  It's a fast narrowing funnel. Lots of advertisers try it. It works well for very few. The few campaigns that work well scale massively. That's why ads are so repetitive for users. "Advertiser" is also an overstatement as this article explains. Most are doing as arbitrage.
tomjen3 7y ago
I have started to simply turn of JavaScript for those sites that either give me any grief about adblockers or show gdpr opt outs.
ForHackernews 7y ago
It's all garbage. I don't get why anyone thinks these ads are any worse than any other online adverts. If anything, they're less creepy because they're generic clickbait and they don't appear to be tracking me or targeting me personally.

joaodlf 7y ago

The world of affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. A lot of developers won't find their nirvana here, and that's understandable, but when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems. I also believe this is an area that is still craving for real innovation and solutions. There is a lot of money to be made here, but no one has really "cracked" it yet, not truly.

Nextgrid 7y ago
I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver? There seems to be little legitimate money to be made and it mostly hinges on tricks & dark patterns to mislead customers into bad deals as far as they’re concerned.
- notahacker 7y ago
  It connects consumers with products and services they might otherwise not have been made aware of, and pays the content producers' bills Sure, a lot of that content is bullshitters bullshitting about bullshit products and in the MLM world some of the bullshit "products" consist solely of instructions on how to make more affiliate links, but affiliate marketing is also how most price/feature comparison sites which are actually useful make their money, and started off as a way of getting people to take writing book reviews more seriously because they could earn a bit from linking interested readers directly to a purchase page on a new website called Amazon.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver? For most pages, I'd say very little to the customer, a lot to the merchant: the merchant can't claim things about the product for legal reasons, can't make up fake reviews/testimonials etc, so they outsource that task to the affiliate. Of course, they don't say "just claim some bullshit", but they accept that it's done, and it will be done because there's a lot of incentive to do it and none to not do it. What I'm really surprised with is the whole couponing sector of affiliate marketing. It doesn't provide any value to the merchant, because people typically look for coupons after they've decided to buy something at a specific store. You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.

tomjmarch 7y ago

So these ads are largely unobtrusive and provide an extra income stream for the WaPo - it certainly feels a bit seedy, but is this actually a bad thing?

Nextgrid 7y ago
They are gross, stalk you across the internet and can lead to malware or scams. At least with most ads the “value” is some kind of product you can buy if you click on it. With these ads there’s no value other than showing you more ads if you click through.
pjc50 7y ago
They're obtrusive - disturbing images of rotting teeth, etc. Taboola and outbrain are the two places I will block at hosts file level even when not running an adblocker simply because of how ugly their ads are.
ceejayoz 7y ago
If nothing else, I suspect it's harmful to the reputations of the news organizations hosting them, especially as they're often themed to look similar to the site. In an era of "fake news" accusations, having actual fake news right there on your home page isn't great.

ablation 7y ago

Easily one of the grubbiest forms of advertising on the web. Hollow, vapid and devoid of value other than for the advertiser. "Chum" is the right word.

shedside 7y ago

I sincerely hate these accursed things. Loathe them. Installed an ad blocker with the specific intent to rid myself of them.

shpx 7y ago
I hope you installed uBlock Origin and not Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin), because these people bought into the protection racket euphemistically referred to as ""Acceptable" Ads" back in late 2014 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 There's even a FAQ entry on the Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin) website (they're almost certainly the same company) > "I want to support websites I love. I just don't want to see ads from Taboola!" which is answered with > We hear you. [...] We agree that Taboola (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Outbrain) ads aren't "acceptable." We're hopeful that now that the Acceptable Ads list is under the control of that third-party board, Taboola and Outbrain will be removed from it. We encourage you to voice your opinion of Taboola ads on the Acceptable Ads forum. The Wayback machine only has it since 2018 but I think it's been there since ""acceptable" ads" was transferred to the completely-independent-and-objective-no-hidden-agenda "third-party board" in 2017. Guess what one of the oldest and the most viewed threads on the forum is about? https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/6000092027-why-does-adblock-allow-non-intrusive-ads- https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60000... Very crafty.
- shedside 7y ago
  That's horrifying. But nah, I'm using 1Blocker.

benj111 7y ago

So what they're saying is, we follow this one simple trick? I just don't believe that.

air7 7y ago

How are they different from Adsense?

notahacker 7y ago
Adsense generally involves [theoretically] context-sensitive text links to regular company websites designed to look like context-sensitive ads, whereas Taboola/Outbrain generally involves a big box of fake news links of the "Secret Brain Pill Used By Millionaires" type, designed to look like a list of news content.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Google are very fussy about who can advertise and what. They'll ban spammy behavior. If your content is not relevant you pay more. If your site score is low you pay more.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago

I have worked in ad tech. It was fun. These types of ads were a funny joke. I have also worked for US defense related companies. It was also fun and the tech was top notch. Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you think deeply enough. Quite a shame.

joaodlf 7y ago
Most people here are incapable of understanding this. HN is full of people who's work is purely good and ethical :). I would love to be able to see the world through those eyes.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you think deeply enough. Quite a shame. It is true. There are degrees - some of the jobs don't hurt others, and some that do don't do it on purpose or as a primary outcome. A company making screws and nails likely exploits only its employees. Some are taking advantage of their customers but still deliver a basic need. Think grocery stores that like to screw with food quality to the limit allowed by laws and social tolerance. You don't get exactly what you think you paid for, but it won't otherwise hurt you either. Some jobs can involve hurting people, but at least have a somewhat plausible justification for it. E.g. some of the defense work can be justified by just protecting your borders and deterring attacks, and the hurt isn't realized until some external party tries to test your defenses. Then there are jobs that are purely about exploiting other people, without giving them much of value. A lot of advertising is this. Chumboxes, telemarketing, e-mail spam, native advertising, retargeting... I could go on. It all essentially boils down to treating human beings as exploitable resources - bags with money that you get to squeeze out by applying psychological pressure. It does feel very much like factory farming. (Yes, this post is sorted in descending order of what I think about occupations. Yes, I think defense companies can be morally superior to advertisers. The former help maintain a bubble of law and order in which we can happily live. The latter exist to screw our lives up.)
- joaodlf 7y ago
  Whatever makes people sleep at night :).

pjc50 7y ago

So I was idly wondering whether the UK Advertising Standards Authority had had a runin with these people, and found surprisingly few examples. https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-srl-a16-335037.html https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-srl-a16-335037... mug with "C" handle and "UNT" body, banned https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-advertising.html https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-... Ruling on "native advertising", mentions Outbrain ruling https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-Inc-A13-251818.html https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-Inc-A13-251818.html

dalbasal 7y ago
UK ASA, is fairly toothless in general. Where they have leverage is with TV (which submit semi-voluntarily) or where the advertiser is regulated by another body, like financial services, pharmaceuticals or gambling. In these cases, the regulators can and do hand out fines based on ASA results. It seems like their website isn't displaying all the rulings though.

k1m 7y ago

Here's Adblock Plus adding Taboola to their "Acceptable Ads" programme to allow those ads to show - enabled by default when you install it: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991 If you haven't already switched, please install and encourage others to install uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

mises 7y ago
From my anecdotal experience, ublock origin is also faster. This is apparently backed up by at least some testing: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/ https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested...
- ohashi 7y ago
  adblock plus is a protection racket iirc.

hope_canyon 7y ago

I interviewed for a role at outbrain as like a... Junior account manager or something, before retraining as a Dev. So glad i missed that noise. I was a tester at an agency and that was ok and worked on some cool stuff... But this would not have been my speed at all. I didn't really know much about outbrain when I interviewed for the job, what an eye opening article.

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
Always do cursory research first! There are people that unknowingly work for adware trojan companies.

alex_young 7y ago

Here's what I don't get: What is being exchanged of value here? In all but one case in this analysis, the only thing that is worth something is the click. A click not leading to a credit card transaction. Take the case of the 5G ad. If you convince a user to click on that and then on one of the ads on the google results, someone gets $10. Nothing of value unless the user also has interest in the super specialized networking equipment being sold, something that seems extraordinarily unlikely. This is a form of fraud isn't it? You're just putting a few million page views in the mix and calling it legitimate behavior when someone accidentally clicks once in a while.

amitport 7y ago
I wouldn't assume ad owners are stupid (maybe sometimes) Generally, they know what those few million page views value is. A direct method could be to pause the campaign for a while and see how it effects a metric that matters to them. (if they don't have such metric, then yeah... they're a little stupid)
dwighttk 7y ago
Someone eventually either buys something, or the company that's paying for the last, most expensive, click goes out of business. But there's a lot of those companies, so there's always (so far) someone paying for those clicks.
- dwighttk 7y ago
  (goes out of business or just stops buying those ads...)
- alex_young 7y ago
  In this view, the sucker is the VC? I'm not saying that's wrong, but wow.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    probably also some small businesspeople of the herbalife/lululemon type...

blueboo 7y ago

A decade of free online news subsidized by the dying gasp of the news industry has set us up perfectly for this. Going forward, that subsidization will finish evaporating and the only news media that can earn ad dollars will be either sponsored content or have chum strewn across them. Buy gold, miracle cures, payday loan, t&a. Expect the chum to be optimized, enhanced, and enriched.

Kadin 7y ago
Or, you know, stuff people are willing to pay for. WaPo and NYT, among others, have seemingly done okay after paywalling their content (with admittedly relaxed rules to preserve inbound hits from Google, Twitter, etc.). The real problem is the lack of a payments infrastructure that doesn't have tremendously high fees for small amounts, especially small recurring payments. I'm willing to pay for a WaPo subscription upfront, for a year, and that makes the credit card fees acceptable on their end. But the amount I'm willing to pay for other sites is smaller, and that probably makes it prohibitive for them to accept credit cards directly, and there's no other good standard way of getting paid. Ironically Google is in the best position to do micropayments (hell they could even do impression-based micropayments!) because it's not too dissimilar from their ad-revenue billing. But of course they won't, because they're an advertising company. But the faster we kill ads, which basically means the more people who use adblockers, the more market pressure will be created for someone to act as a clearinghouse for small payments between content creators and consumers. And the stuff that people aren't willing to pay for, won't be created, or will be created only if it's someone's hobby or scratches their creative itch.

mehlmao 7y ago

A few years ago I got really into the (ad-supported) solitaire game included with Windows 10. I wasn't really surprised that almost all the ads were Outbrain/Taboola type chum, targeted at senior citizens. I was surprised that almost all of the ads were scams, promising 0% interest mortgage refinancing or threatening that you could lose your Medicare benefits, etc. I wonder why we haven't seen backlash towards companies hosting obviously malicious ads.

hnitbanalns 7y ago

Must have been sponsored by revcontent.com

cm2012 7y ago

Taboola and Outbrain type ads are what you get when you don't have good ad targeting available. FB and Instagram ads are much higher quality because of the targeting FB offers.

onemoresoop 7y ago

Taboola and Outbrain are everywhere. They pretend to be: "Taboola and outbrain are clearly filling a need in the market. There is a gap between what publishers can monetize through their existing direct and remnant channels, which outbrain and taboola help fill. They also provide the sites with deeper engagement by cross linking related content that people are likely to read." That was funny.. With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked with Israeli intelligence and do more than just provide third party advertising. To me it is a good idea to block them off.

Shekelberg 7y ago
> With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked with Israeli intelligence That sure is interesting. In fact, all three of the clickbait companies (Taboola, Outbrain, and Wazimo) mentioned in the article are founded and run by Israelis. What are the odds of that? It's quite a coincidence just how often companies involved in scams and unethical behavior just happen to be run by an ethnic group that makes up 0.2% of the world population.
huac 7y ago
I saw that they are Israeli companies, but what ties do they have to Israeli intelligence (beyond, I suppose, that their Israeli employees had previously done mandatory military service)?
amitport 7y ago
They are not "both linked with Israeli intelligence". Do note though that Google, Facebook, apple, did disclose that they work in collaboration with the US intelligence.

air7 7y ago

An interesting ethical question is who in the supply chain is responsible for the chum content, and how much. Lets assume an ad is an out-right scam of some sort. The advertiser is obviously guilty, but is the ad aggregate to blame (outbrain yes, adsense no)? The hosting website? (no, but their reputation should be affected). The CDN (no, and cloudflare's attempt was censorship), The hosting company or the domain registrar or my ISP (no) Maybe the browser itself or the OS or my router (no) or the adblocker failing to block the ad (yes, if it was via acceptable ads). There are many (more) players in the "supply chain" yet we perceive their respective responsibility differently, perhaps arbitrarily. I wrote my gut reactions in parenthesis above, but I can't see a strong rational behind my own sentiments.

troyvit 7y ago

I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better. Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content, but until the world finds a successful way for people to pay up for what they enjoy it's what the industry has to work with. That out of the way I have a few issues with this piece. 1. Ranjan did an interesting thing that chum purveyors like us do all the time. He lead the article with a disturbing screenshot of the lowest piece of crap chum he could find. That draws you in to read more because who wouldn't stare at a train wreck right? What he didn't say is that the screenshot he showed isn't an Outbrain widget. In fact almost every recommendation in that widget breaks Outbrain's content guidelines (https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/ https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/) and would be removed from our network. Tying those ads to Outbrain is not accurate. 2. The block of chum below the first one, with the 5G and such? Yeah totally Outbrain. Ranjan went through all the ads there and found none of them are harmful. Yeah some are vapid entertainment, one is a nonsensical link to a dying search engine, but a few of them gasp are actually useful. Somehow though the fact that people make money off of advertising is bad. 3. None of either example are worse than what you would find in the back pages of Psychology Today or Popular Science back in the day. Those publishers were as responsible for those ads back then as WaPo is for the chum at the bottom of its articles today. If you read our content guidelines you'll see that Outbrain takes that responsibility seriously. We're guests on our publishers' pages and we never forget that. I think this article could have gone a whole lot deeper into the terrifying world of ad arbitrage, programmatic buying, behavioral tracking, GDPR skirting, etc. and it would have been more meaningful, but the fact that it is complaining that these chum buckets are as bad as display advertising in the magazine era isn't really saying anything new.

flancian 7y ago

I call these arbitrash. I hate them with a passion, partly because I understand (deep down) why they continue to exist: they sometimes work on me, in the sense that they arouse the basest form of curiosity and I get the impulse of clicking on them. I like myself a little less for it, even though I never actually do it.

hakfoo 7y ago

It's about he difficulty of brands coexisting with news content. Traditional content-based and even remarketing ads are risky to run against news articles. Too many of them are depressing or controversial-- nobody wants to accidentally advertise cheap flights next to a plane crash article, or anything opposite a polarizing political piece. The chumbox advertisers, being nameless arbritrage affiliates or fly-by-night sellers, have zero brand equity. They have very little to lose if they accidentally get their ad running against the wrong message.