Blog

Banner ads, for better or worse, got their fair share of the headlines this week. Some hate them, some still love them, but the expertier of experts agree that they're still quite effective. So effective, that fraudsters are still trying to cash in, these days via “domain laundering.” Lastly, despite what else you made have read, the only thing this week that actually came close to #BreakTheInternet was the DFP outage.

• Ad Blocking: Can Publishers Catch A Break? (MediaPost) – New data show that nearly 30% of U.S. web users are using ad blockers, and that number goes up to 41% for the much-coveted Millennial generation. When ads are blocked, ad buyers are left with the chance to spend their money on some other impression somewhere else. Publishers, however, see that impression gone forever and with it the chance to earn revenue from it. So it makes sense that 76% of publishers are worried about ad-blockers. But what can be done about it?

• In Defense of Banner Ads: Everybody Hates Them, but They Work (AdAge) – New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo blatantly declared the fall of the banner ad last week, protesting that not only are they ineffective but that “they have ruined the appearance and usability of the web, covering every available pixel of every page with clunky bits of sponsorship.” Despite the claims by Manjoo — just the most recent of many — the banner ad business remains alive and well today. The best defense of the banner ad's effectiveness came from a person whose job it is to make sure client money is spent in the method that will yield the highest return. Tim Goosmann, chief creative at agency True North, writes in AdAge that his agency continues “to design and serve online display advertising … as an integral part of any multichannel campaign.”

• Domain ‘Laundering' Is the Latest Fraud Threat (Wall Street Journal) – There wages a not-so-secret war on ad fraud, featuring players from all sides of the equation. Take a look at one of the latest favored fraud technique from the pilferers of the programmatic landscape. It's called “domain laundering,” and it can make marketers thing they're buying legit ads on proper sites, but what they're actually buying is still (somewhat) legit traffic but on site's they're rather have no part of in purchasing.

Also, Google's DFP went down, here's the fallout …

• Google's DoubleClick Outage Turns Internet Ad-Free For Over an Hour (Wall Street Journal)

• Google's DoubleClick Ad Server Went Down, Costing Publishers Globally ‘$1 Million An Hour' In Lost Revenue (Business Insider)

• DoubleClick Outage Cost Some Publishers Thousands, but Others Cashed In (AdAge)

• DoubleClick outage highlights Google's ‘single-point-of-failure' problem (Digiday)