The Underbelly of the Internet

My startup makes purchase-cycle prediction models (among other things), meaning that we figure out what people are doing on the internet days, weeks, and months before a purchase; and then we invert that to target advertising.

As part of the testing of the technology, we bought remnant run-of-network inventory on a major ad network and used our model to present Ebay auctions in banner ad space. While the experiment was a success, I am permanently scarred by the experience, since I spent alot of time looking at the sites that we were placed on, and it was not a pretty picture.

The issue was not the content. There were some sites that were either illegal or low value, e.g., video sharing (warezing) sites and automatically generated appropriated content republishers, but these were not typical. Indeed, there were alot of interesting fan sites (e.g., bon jovi, detroit red wings), in addition to real innovation (I discovered failblog.org this way, and they are now a regular source of personal mirth).

The ads were the issue. First, most of these pages' layouts are hellish because they are trying to maximize monetization by having multiple ad units. Second, the ads being shown were at best uninteresting and at worse facilitating fraud. The four ads shown here occurred constantly. We call ads like this "belly fat" around the office, in honor of the one with a stomach pic. You should be thankful that I'm not showing the animated version of the belly fat ad, cycling between the before and after picture.

None of the ad networks are immune to belly fat. Google Adsense might seem like a paragon of virtue but they were the source of the cheddah gets cheddah ads, which are the equivalent of those late night commercials with the guy wearing a suit that has question marks all over it. When Millard calls for an end to the tyranny of the click, I hear "end of belly fat".

If someone has built an interesting website serving an audience of, e.g., Bon Jovi fans, then why are they showing belly fat ads? One problem is that they are too small to attract the attention of advertisers who are interested in that audience; technologies like OpenX market can assist by aggregating these tail publishers and reducing friction. However the problem is not just size, otherwise large publishers like Martha Stewart wouldn't be complaining about the lack of creative innovation in web advertising.

The publisher bears some blame, because they could make the decision to show nothing but rarely do (in defense of publishers, ad networks keep publishers in the dark preventing them from making decisions like this). However I believe the fundamental difficulty is the barge pole problem: quality advertisers cannot embrace the tail of the internet because the landscape is so variable that they risk being potentially associated with content that is unprofessional, offensive, or even illegal. Only belly fat is brave (shameless) enough to wade in, and that makes the situation worse, because who wants to be shown on a site that also shows unethical near-fraudulent ads?

Interestingly, even cable television suffers from the barge pole problem, and cable channels are light-years more elegant than the long-tail of the internet.