[manigandham]

Not really, the whole industry knows Taboola and Outbrain are the lowest tier, barely above scammy affiliate links. There are of course worse networks like RevContent but nobody is mistaking Taboola for anything but shady.

[sgc]

I am so glad I have no idea what any of you are talking about. I have been using ublock origin from the day I heard of the possibility of adblock jumping shark.

[kjax]

I personally consider a native platform's shadiness by a mix of the kind of content they allow, the kind of content that ends up on there, and the amount of fraudulent traffic/clicks that advertisers get billed for.

Taboola and Outbrain at least have manual reviewers attempting to uphold a certain standard for content, though there is a ton of room for improvement. I've never noticed a lot of suspect traffic coming from these two, which is in stark contrast to networks like content.ad or adblade. Of course, Outbrain/Taboola don't compare to the big networks, but I've experienced a good balance of affordable and reasonable quality traffic, though this isn't always the case, as costs/quality can be quite variable over time.