There’s nothing immoral about profits – the size, however, can be. My law & economics teacher
Dear Diary,
I originally intended to write about positive changes within the ad tech community. However, my mind is stuck on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the IAB’s decision to keep it in place. And, therefore, in my opinion, following the path Twitter took when Elon Musk purchased it, with Meta now following suit. Advertisers call for brand-safe, high quality inventory which should ideally be easily accessible and cheap. The latter two are easily done, thanks to programmatics, but not without quality suffering gravely. The latest adalytics report is probably not an exception, but one that got enough attention thanks to the credibility of the CheckMyAds institute and Krzysztof F.
But what has even shaped my opinion? I set up PHP BB forums as a teenager and after university started working at Germany’s biggest Q&A platform where I was part of an internal startup where people could pay for legal answers and provide documents via upload. It allowed its users to pay experts to answer any question around YMYL (your money, your life) content. But once an upload feature was added, those paying customers – mind you, an answer cost a few Euros – began uploading nude photographs. At least one in 100 pictures uploaded was a dick pic. Without content moderation, those pictures would have ruined the concept of the platform and also ruined the experience for most users. Today I still work at gutefrage.net, the biggest German language based Q&A platform. It has had a professional content moderation system throughout its existence. A team of employed content moderators, aided by various machine learning algorithms, continuously scan the uploaded content for policy infringements. Only last year, the content moderation system and flow were revised to be DSA compliant – an effort costing many hours of labour.
With all the experience we have gathered, we know that if you want high quality inventory, you have to vet the websites or the legal environment they operate in. But it comes at a price: high quality content and thus high quality inventory is expensive.
Innovation! Growth!
How do you have time to innovate and grow, if you are spending time and money to moderate your content? I understand how our capitalistic economy works and that growth is an important factor. In the end, we build the products for real people and not for companies or to enrich single individuals. It is those individuals who profit from deregulation in order to gain more power. People should be rewarded for their hard work and the success they have earned. The focus is on their own hard work – not on the work their parents did, not on the work underpaid employees did or money extorted from users who didn’t know better.
Without government regulations, the voice- and powerless can never take credit for their labour. They must be protected, and the wealth must be distributed evenly among them, so they all can benefit from innovation and growth. Yet, we are witnessing the corruption of control through regulations by a certain group of billionaires as they are suing and destroying institutions such as GARM, influencing elections through the social media platforms they own, and misusing the argument of „free speech“ to silence valid discussions on the internet.
“Section 230 provides protection for businesses who provide services to people, and if those people misabuse those services, the person who provided the services is not held liable for it,” he said. “It’s basically allowed for our internet to grow to where it is today.”
To me, this equals a lack of accountability by those services. It does not seem to matter that elections are being influenced all around the world, that suicide rates among teenagers are increasing, that high quality journalism and democracy itself are at risk, as long as the industry is continuously growing.
I want to believe that we are heading into a quality era for advertising, but I’m not sure who is going to pay the CPMs or publish the content if this continues. As even the EU are now yielding under the pressure of current events, and are therefore not renewing the debate on the AI Liability Directive. Growth is sought by everyone, yes – but please with a minimal amount of responsibility. Even if it means a platform is now crawling with porn bots, and advertising companies are being sued so they keep buying ads which are shown to even more bots.
Moderation is not censorship
Last but not least, I want to share an xkcd comic that sums this up perfectly.
Take care of your users. Take care of your content. Take care of yourself.
In der programmatischen Werbung ist der Begriff Supply Path Optimization (SPO) längst kein Fremdwort mehr – doch zwischen Theorie und Praxis klafft oft eine deutliche Lücke. Während SPO verspricht, Kosten zu senken, Transparenz zu erhöhen und Prozesse effizienter zu gestalten, scheuen viele Publisher den Schritt zur konsequenten Umsetzung
The open web is a constantly evolving place. I built my first websites with the classic LAMP stack, basic HTML and CSS files with JQuery sprinkled into. Lately, we see more and more of our publishers moving or already using some sort of client-side rendering. Initially this was coined as SPA, single page application, as the browser would only load a single page once and all navigation would just replace parts of the page by fetching data from a server and alter the UI with it.
Die DSGVO schreibt vor, dass Nutzer ihre ausdrückliche Einwilligung geben müssen, bevor personalisierte Werbung ausgespielt oder Tracking durchgeführt werden darf. Nutzer, die keine Zustimmung zur Datennutzung geben, stellen seit jeher eine Herausforderung für Publisher dar, die mit dem Verkauf ihrer Anzeigenflächen Geld verdienen.
