It has been incredibly depressing seeing "farticles" migrate from scammy affiliate marketers pushing weight loss pills and teeth whitening salves to now being p

It has been incredibly depressing seeing "farticles" migrate from scammy affiliate marketers pushing weight loss pills and teeth whitening salves to now being peddled by once semi-reputable publishers just trying to stay afloat. Traditional media (direct display buys, TV, radio, etc.) are hard to measure efficacy at a small scale. Display ads (whether contextual, behavioral or retargeting) have the same problem (contextual is probably the best performing, but the lowest available inventory) as traditional media-- but with a larger sales force having more resources to lead advertisers to believe that the ads are working versus what a traditional publisher had available. Google has consolidated the market and added more and more levels of opaqueness through their ploys against header bidding[1], intentionally slowing non-AMP pages[2] as well as making the Google Ads platform more and more optimized against advertisers being able to control what they're purchasing while optimizing fill rates. Google has successfully ran competing ad platforms out of the market and pretty obviously capture any ROI that advertisers have had-- it isn't like an unhappy advertiser can just up and switch ad platforms when over 70% of web display inventory[3] goes through DoubleClick. [1] https://adage.com/article/digital/how-header-bidding-wars-led-google-antitrust-case-and-claims-collusion-facebook/2307586 https://adage.com/article/digital/how-header-bidding-wars-le... [2] https://searchengineland.com/google-throttled-amp-page-speeds-created-format-to-hamper-header-bidding-antitrust-complaint-claims-375466 https://searchengineland.com/google-throttled-amp-page-speed... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-googles-advertising-dominance-is-drawing-antitrust-scrutiny-11560763800 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-googles-advertising-dominan...