[mpeg]

Just want to point out that AdChoices is NOT owned by Google, and they do NOT serve any advertising.

It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to.

Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad.

I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo!

EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform.

Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform.

Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method.

[0] https://streamads.yahoo.com/

[troymc]

You wrote "it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through"

I'm surprised they fact check any ads. Many publications don't have the budget to fact check their news, features, or editorials, never mind the ads.

[skygazer]

I worked at Earthlink in the mid nineties, and happened to sit next to the girl that approved all the ad placements on the site's (yahoo-like) start page. She would casually lean over and ask me if this or that medical claim seemed plausible. I typically said no. The claims were often so snake oily even the most modest biology background, or just common sense would refute them. Thankfully she had the sense to ask.

[mpeg]

Definitely, the usual things that are checked would be whether the page loads, whether the creative is offensive, etc.

Facebook gets a lot of flak for having poor ads, but they have a pretty comprehensive list of rules [0] and they actually enforce most of them through semi-manual audits of the first few ads each account creates.

Most networks will say that content of their ads must not be deceptive, but ultimately they can only audit a small percentage of them.

Usually they have heuristics to try to identify the most "high risk" categories such as adult / alcohol and they will make sure those are not being targeted to minors, as they would get in trouble otherwise. But "miracle pill" and "doctors hate him!" ads are harder to automatically filter out.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

[discardorama]

> Facebook uses a whitelist approach

Yahoo used to use a whitelist approach too; but with RTB (programmatic buying) it is no longer feasible to do that. And unfortunately, the whole world is moving to RTB... :-(

[mpeg]

RTB and programmatic are not the same thing though, I agree that Real Time Bidding makes it hard to both let everyone play and enforce ad quality (I think it could be done if publishers took a stand).

However, RTB is just a kind of programmatic, I wouldn't be surprised if these ads were being served through the self-serve platform instead, which is probably still API-driven but doesn't need to be real time.

Advertisers shouldn't be using RTB exclusively, you could get better results when you play to the strengths of each different way of buying.