Advertising is a cancer on society — Jacek Złydach

What Were We Thinking? The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads

Often the criticism of vintage ads focuses on their inherent sexism, racism, or other displays of social prejudices, which we find laughable today, despit...

Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers - Stack Overflow

Hi! I’m Steve Feldman, Senior Ad Ops Manager at Stack Overflow. My whole life I’ve been fascinated by advertising. Even as a kid, I wondered what a company was trying to tell me by using one word instead of another in an ad. Over time, I developed a strong (read: subjective) opinion of what makes an ad ’good,’ and what makes an ad ’bad.’ It took me many years-- in fact, it wasn’t until joining the Ad Sales team at Stack Overflow-- to finally figure out that the common thread shared by the best ads is relevance. Maintaining that relevance is how we’ve managed to avoid one of the biggest issues facing publishers today: ad blocking.

Debunking the science of advertising

We delve into the world of advertising, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, to find out if it's really even that effective. A collection with 3 stories from The Correspondent.

What If We Made Advertising Illegal?

What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.

“You Will:” A Macroeconomic Analysis of Digital Advertising

Abstract. An information-based model is developed where traditional and digital advertising finance the provision of free media goods and affect price comp

Cancer Capital: It sucks for founders, too! - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

I truly hate mostpeopleslop

In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck... "The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence." That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a pile of

The Truth About Social Media as an "Advertising Industry," Bluesky's Gamble, and "Reclaiming Conversation" - Nightflight

Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?

I started calling online advertising a bubble in 2008. I made “The Advertising Bubble” a chapter in The Intention Economy in 2012. I’ve been unpacking what I figure ought to be ob…

New Research: Is an Ad-Supported Internet Feasible in Emerging Markets? | The Mozilla Blog

Fresh research conducted by Caribou Digital and funded by Mozilla explores digital advertising models in the Global South — whether they can succeed, and

Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life@mas.to)

The decline of the advertising supported internet is inevitable yet sad. Tech has been unique in being an equalizer. A poor Nigerian kid, a techie in the US or Jeff Bezos all used the same apps and websites. Now many charge $5-$15 per month creating a huge financial divide. Online advertising is a progressive form of taxation as the rich, mostly US-based consumers who buy goods & services from ads subsidized the internet for everyone else. We now live in the flat tax version of the internet.

Ads and Ad blockers

Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easyli...

Can We Ever Know If Online Advertising Really Works?

In the summer of 2003, Viacom executive Mel Karmazin managed to sum up old media’s horror of the Internet with one of business lore’s greatest vulgar...

Bait and Switch: The Failure of Facebook Advertising - An OSINT Investigation - bellingcat

Translations:English (UK)This article was originally posted on the Hunchly blog on Medium. This story starts with Sidney Crosby. A professional hockey player and Canadian icon. I can neither confirm nor deny that I welled up like a small child at the Hockey Hall of Fame’s “Golden Goal” display (I will never forget that moment). So […]

Broken by Design - Ad Tech and What We Can Do About It

This is the first banner ad. Created for an AT&T advertising campaign in 1994 by Wired Magazine it is perhaps the most influential thing to ever happen to the internet. No single thing has done more to change, deform, alter, or make sustainable the web. When it launched, it had a 44% CTR - that’s...