Online heavy-hitters Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL (Engadget’s parent company) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have have struck an alliance aimed at ridding nasty advertising “from all corners of the web.” Stemming from the existing StopBadware group that began in 2006, the group will develop policies, build a platform for identifying scofflaws and share trends with government and law enforcement. For its part, Google curbed 130 million ads promoting counterfeit articles, malware and worse in 2011, but said baddies would normally move their shady businesses to another corner of the internet. Thus, the aim of this new league is to aid players across the web with its super resources in a bid to stop the knavery, no matter where it tries to hide.
Facebook, Google, Twitter spearhead Ads Integrity Alliance to thwart villainous ads originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Online heavy-hitters Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL (Engadget’s parent company) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have have struck an alliance aimed at ridding nasty advertising “from all corners of the web.” Stemming from the existing StopBadware group that began in 2006, the group will develop policies, build a platform for identifying scofflaws and share trends with government and law enforcement. For its part, Google curbed 130 million ads promoting counterfeit articles, malware and worse in 2011, but said baddies would normally move their shady businesses to another corner of the internet. Thus, the aim of this new league is to aid players across the web with its super resources in a bid to stop the knavery, no matter where it tries to hide.
Facebook, Google, Twitter spearhead Ads Integrity Alliance to thwart villainous ads originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last week, the bipartisan Kerry-McCain bill proposed legislation on a Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights that would put the Federal Trade Commission in charge of policing the online collection, sharing and use of personal information. Because the legislation is watered down relative to prior proposals, the Kerry-McCain bill will face the least industry resistance and is more likely to be passed this year. That has far-reaching implications for the online media business, as I detail over at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).
The proposed bill is relatively business-friendly, so much so that it’s drawing criticism from privacy rights activists. Although advertising industry groups are predictably resistant to any kind of regulation, their initial reactions to Kerry-McCain seem more muted than concerns they had prior to the bill’s introduction. Big tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Intel, for example, have already expressed support for the bill.
The real promise of online advertising is that it holds the potential combination of television-like reach with the ability to very precisely target audiences. But passage of the Kerry-McCain bill — or even something similar — could shift some power in online media and force changes in the way online ad networks and other targeters work with content sites. Here are two of the effects the bill could have on the online world:
Online content sites: Some traditional publishers might be perfectly happy without web-wide behavioral targeting. They could tout the value of their online/offline audience and promote contextual targeting and sponsorships. The bill lets publishers follow and target a user within their own site, which would benefit portals like Yahoo and AOL with their huge audiences and broad variety of content.
Online advertising ecosystem: The bill’s restrictive approach to behavioral targeting favors search advertising over display ad formats. The data sharing guidelines could force data miners (Experian, Audience Science, BlueKai) and ad networks (DoubleClick, ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media) to secure more formal contractual relationships with content sites that have registered users. And the legislation seems to leave room for third parties to take user info and create anonymized groups of targetable customer “types” based on demographics and behavior.
For other potential effects on the rest of the online ad ecosystem and social media targeting, as well as a more in-depth look at what does — and does not — focus on, read my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).
Updated: If you’re a traditional journalist, or someone who works for a traditional media outlet, the easiest way to cast aspersions at a digital media entity is to use the A word: that is, “aggregation.” New York Times executive editor Bill Keller stayed true to form in a piece he wrote for his newspaper Thursday, in which he categorized The Huffington Post and other unnamed online media outlets as pirates, who are in the business of “counterfeiting” content rather than engaging in “real” journalism. In only a few paragraphs, the NYT editor managed to say volumes about how little he understands where media is, or where it is going.
Keller’s piece starts out as a humble discussion of his status as the 50th most powerful person in the world (according to Forbes magazine) and how he thinks this is absurd, since he just runs a newspaper. But it quickly becomes a complaint about how members of the media — and assorted “flocks of media oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks,” as well as professional pundits such as Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen — spend too much time talking about media in the abstract instead of doing it.
Then he launches into an attack on aggregators, saying the media industry has “bestowed our highest honor — market valuation — not on those who labor over the making of original journalism but on aggregation,” an obvious reference to the $315-million acquisition of the Huffington Post by AOL.
And what does the term aggregation mean? That seems to depend on who does it. The NYT editor says aggregation can mean “smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe,” and then he admits this “kind of describes what I do as an editor.” So aggregation is journalism then? But wait — Keller goes on to say that aggregation often amounts to:
[T]aking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.
Arianna Huffington
This is where he calls out the Huffington Post, whose founder is “the queen of aggregation,” having discovered that “if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.” The NYT editor goes on to say that while AOL called the acquisition of Huffington Post a key part of its content strategy, buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is “like a company announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.” (Update: Arianna Huffington has posted a response to Keller’s piece at her site).
Keller seems to be missing the point that all media — both online and offline — is, to some extent, about aggregation. (He’s not the only one; the New Republic had a similarly wrong-headed piece about it recently). Even newspapers aggregate content from newswires and occasionally rewrite it to make it their own. Yes, they pay those newswires for the privilege, and so does the Huffington Post. The difference is that it pays in attention, which it directs back to the original source, just as Google pays with links when it aggregates content at Google News. According to a Huffington Post staffer, news websites actually beg the site to aggregate their content, since it gets more traffic.
Aggregation is a term that covers a wide variety of behavior, some of it nefarious and much of it not. To take just one example, look at what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing by pulling in and republishing Twitter posts from hundreds of different people — both individuals and journalists, including New York Times writer Nick Kristof — as a way of covering the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Is that aggregation? Sure it is (or “curation,” as some prefer to call it). Is Carvin not taking reports from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications and republishing them? Of course he is. But he’s also engaged in a very real form of 21st-century journalism. And maybe if Bill Keller spent a little more time trying to understand how aggregation works instead of railing against it, the New York Times would be a little further ahead in this new media game, instead of playing catch-up with Arianna Huffington.
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