Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain

https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply

by ksajadi • 7 years ago

208 127 7 years ago

themargins.substack.com

samdung• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

joaodlf11• 7 years 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.

JudgeWapner• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

one of the main reasons why publishers stick with them is because these networks give the publishers minimum guranteed deals.

wastedhours• 7 years 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.

dalbasal2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

joaodlf11• 7 years 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.

Nextgrid6• 7 years 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.

luckylion4• 7 years 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.

notahacker2• 7 years 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.

luckylion4• 7 years ago

you get to solve some really interesting problems

Like what? Attribution and customer journey?

Nextgrid6• 7 years ago

Aka stalking. No thanks, I’ll work on more ethical things.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

when you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really interesting problems

This is how a lot of people justify working on some pretty awful things :(

joaodlf11• 7 years ago

Sure, but Affiliate Marketing is just marketing. It's not the best thing in the world, but it sure as hell isn't worse than the likes of Facebook, Google, etc.

tomjmarch• 7 years 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?

Nextgrid6• 7 years 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.

pjc502• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

shedside2• 7 years ago

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

shpx• 7 years 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

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/60000...

Very crafty.

shedside2• 7 years ago

That's horrifying. But nah, I'm using 1Blocker.

benj111• 7 years ago

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

air72• 7 years ago

How are they different from Adsense?

notahacker2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

joaodlf11• 7 years 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.

TeMPOraL9• 7 years 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.)

joaodlf11• 7 years ago

Whatever makes people sleep at night :).

empath75• 7 years ago

Quite a bit of the modern capitalist system revolves around hiding exploitation, violence and slavery from the people who benefit from it.

Arbitraging evil, in a way.

tomp• 7 years ago

Also used to work in adtech (not military tech, yet). Now I work in finance, for a hedge fund. For all the bad things you can say about finance, at least people are voluntarily chosing to participate in it (in contrast with ads, which are pushed onto users involuntarily - maybe not online ads, but most certainly real-life ads).

pjc502• 7 years 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... mug with "C" handle and "UNT" body, banned

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

dalbasal2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

If you haven't already switched, please install and encourage others to install uBlock Origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

mises• 7 years 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...

ohashi• 7 years ago

adblock plus is a protection racket iirc.

hope_canyon• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

alex_young2• 7 years 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.

amitport2• 7 years 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)

dwighttk3• 7 years 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.

dwighttk3• 7 years ago

(goes out of business or just stops buying those ads...)

alex_young2• 7 years ago

In this view, the sucker is the VC? I'm not saying that's wrong, but wow.

Illniyar• 7 years ago

It is factored in really. The people who advertise on that yahoo keyword are aware that somewhere close to 80% of clicks or views are worthless to begin with (clickbaits, dark patterns, actual fraud).

In a lot of cases it is still worth it. In many other cases people perceive it to be worth it, but don't really do the research involved to prove that it is.

blueboo• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

cm2012• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

huac• 7 years 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)?

amitport2• 7 years 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.

air72• 7 years 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.

troyvit7• 7 years 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/) 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain

Related Stories