[troyvit]

And Programmatic advertising makes this extremely difficult. Once you add a giant, automated ad exchange to advertising you've created opaque supply chains that help make it trivial to obfuscate who actually makes money from an ad. This article on ad fraud goes into more detail: https://xenoss.io/blog/programmatic-ad-fraud-detection

[crowcroft]

Agree on issues with programmatic. Compared to the number of dollars, and in particular number of dollars being spent on ads served to under 18s, programmatic is a rounding error compared to Google, Meta, TikTok etc.

https://www.emarketer.com/uploads/pdf/US_Ad_Spending_2023.pd...

[troyvit]

Whoah good point. Man for how small that market is they sure spend a lot of time screwing it up. Given their closed systems, do Google, Meta and TikTok have tighter controls over ads served to kids that they just aren't applying, or is it something else?

[crowcroft]

Over the years it’s hard to grok just how small ‘traditional’ media has become. Messing up programmatic and letting a ton of scam tech vendors take most of the money out of the system is a large part of that problem.

My experience is that the big vendors are better than scummy programmatic platforms in terms of ‘safety’ but even then not by much.

Even YouTube’s ‘for kids’ product consistently has scandals break out about it which says where the company’s priorities are.