24. George P. Slefo, “Report: For Every $3 Spent on Digital Ads, Fraud Takes $1,” AdAge, Oct. 22, 2015, adage.com/article/digital/ad-fraud-eating-digital-advertising-revenue/301017.
25. Susan Bidel et al., “Poor Quality Ads Cost US Marketers $7.4 Billion in 2016,” Forrester Research, March 30, 2017, www.forrester.com/report/Poor+Quality+Ads+Cost+US+Marketers+74+Billion+In+2016/-/E-RES136115.
26. Ross Benes, “The State of Video Ad Fraud,” Digiday, Nov. 2, 2017, digiday.com/marketing/state-video-ad-fraud.
27. Stuart Feil, “The Massive Scale of Mobile Ad Fraud,” Adweek, March 22, 2018.
28. Jessica Davies, “The FT Warns Advertisers After Discovering High Levels of Domain Spoofing,” Digiday, Sept. 27, 2017, digiday.com/media/ft-warns-advertisers-discovering-high-levels-of-domain-spoofing.
29. Michael H. Keller, “The Flourishing Business of Fake YouTube Views,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/11/technology/youtube-fake-view-sellers.html.
30. Craig Silverman, “Apps Installed on Millions of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior to Execute a Multimillion-Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme,” BuzzFeed News, Oct. 23, 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-a-massive-ad-fraud-scheme-exploited-android-phones-to.
31. Lucia Moses, “‘The Professionalization of Fraud’: Agencies Are Alarmed by ‘Methbot’ Scheme,” Digiday, Dec. 21, 2016, digiday.com/media/professionalization-fraud-agencies-alarmed-methbot-scheme.
32. Benes, “The State of Video Ad Fraud.” Fraud accounts for 22 percent of ad spending in video.
33. See, generally, Ken Auletta, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), chaps. 1–2.
34. Babak Pahlavan, “New MRC Accreditations and Partners for Google and YouTube Ads Measurement,” Google Ads Blog, Sept. 26, 2018, www.blog.google/products/ads/transparency-choice-ads-measurement; Allison Schiff, “Facebook and GroupM Tussle on Third-Party Viewability Verification,” AdExchanger, June 3, 2015, adexchanger.com/online-advertising/facebook-and-groupm-tussle-on-third-party-viewability-verification.
35. “Ads.Txt—Authorized Digital Sellers,” IAB Tech Lab, iabtechlab.com/ads-txt.
36. Ross Benes, “The State of Ads.Txt,” Digiday, Jan. 22, 2018, digiday.com/marketing/state-ads-txt.
37. Bruce Schneier, “Detecting Adblocker Blockers,” Schneier on Security (blog), Jan. 5, 2018, www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/01/detecting_adblo.html.
38. Sapna Maheshwari, “Adblock Plus, Created to Protect Users from Ads, Instead Opens the Door,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-plus-created-to-protect-users-from-ads-opens-the-door.html.
39. Sam Barker, “Future Digital Advertising: AI, Ad Fraud, and Ad Blocking, 2017–2022,” Juniper Research, www.juniperresearch.com/researchstore/content-commerce/future-digital-advertising.
40. Ross Benes, “Study: Top Publishers Like The New York Times and The Washington Post Lose $3.5 Million a Day to Domain Spoofing,” Digiday, Dec. 12, 2017, digiday.com/media/using-ads-txt-publishers-catch-buyers-spending-1-billion-year-fake-video-inventory.
41. “Ads.Txt Reduces Ad Fraud by 10%, but Double-Digit Ad Fraud Rates Persist,” Pixalate Blog, Sept. 25, 2018, blog.pixalate.com/does-ads-txt-reduce-ad-fraud.
42. Ross Benes, “How Publishers Are Getting Fooled by Ads.Txt Fraud,” Digiday, Nov. 6, 2017, digiday.com/media/publishers-getting-fooled-ads-txt-fraud.
43. Lara O’Reilly, “Scammers Target Ad Industry’s Initiative to Thwart Fraud,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/scammers-target-ad-industrys-initiative-to-thwart-fraud-11549537200.
44. Patrick Kulp, “Mobile Ad Fraud Is Surging as Scammers Get Smarter, According to New Report,” Adweek, May 24, 2018, www.adweek.com/digital/mobile-ad-fraud-is-surging-as-scammers-get-smarter-researchers-say.
45. “2017 Adblock Report,” Blockthrough.
46. Garett Sloane, “Snapchat May Force Users to Watch Three Seconds of Ads Before Skipping,” AdAge, Jan. 2, 2018, adage.com/article/digital/snapchat-considers-making-users-sit-3-seconds-ads/311775.
47. Alison McCarthy, “Millennials and YouTube Ads: Most Watch Until They Can Skip,” eMarketer, Jan. 6, 2017, www.emarketer.com/Article/Millennials-YouTube-Ads-Most-Watch-Until-They-Skip/1014979.
5. Inflating the Bubble
1. Ben S. Bernanke, “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit” (remarks at the Sandridge Lecture, Virginia Association of Economists, Richmond, March 10, 2005), www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/200503102.
2. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States (2011), 104, fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/5034.
3. Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, “The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2008,” www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/son2008.pdf.
4. Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), chap. 5.
5. “eMarketer Releases New Global Media Ad Spending Estimates,” eMarketer, May 7, 2018, www.emarketer.com/content/emarketer-total-media-ad-spending-worldwide-will-rise-7-4-in-2018.
6. See, for example, Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu, “Responses to Entry in Multi-sided Markets: The Impact of Craigslist on Local Newspapers,” Management Science 60, no. 2 (Feb. 2014): 476–93. This article describes a 2013 study estimating a $5 billion loss to newspapers as a result of Craigslist.
7. Jasmine Enberg, “Global Digital Ad Spending 2019,” eMarketer, March 28, 2019, www.emarketer.com/content/global-digital-ad-spending-2019.
8. See “US TV Ad Spending to Fall in 2018,” eMarketer, March 28, 2018, www.emarketer.com/content/us-tv-ad-spending-to-fall-in-2018.
9. See Heather Connon, “Why Ninja Mortgages Could Wreak Havoc,” Observer (London), Sept. 30, 2007, www.theguardian.com/business/2007/sep/30/5.
10. See Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018), 49, which discusses the incentives of ratings agencies to be “helpful.”
11. Ibid., 70.
12. See, for example, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, “Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/business/24trading.html.
13. See Michael Farmer, Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies, 2nd ed. (New York: LID, 2017).
14. See, for example, Jeff Beer, “Why Ad Agencies Shouldn’t Fear Facebook’s Creative Shop,” Fast Company, April 12, 2017, www.fastcompany.com/40405239/why-ad-agencies-shouldnt-fear-facebooks-creative-shop.
15. Seb Joseph, “Ad Quality Rises to the Top of the Agenda for Media Agency Reviews,” Digiday, Jan. 20, 2018, digiday.com/marketing/ad-quality-rises-top-agenda-media-agency-reviews.
16. See Ken Auletta, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else) (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), chap. 1.
17. See Jessica Davies, “‘Data Arbitrage Is as Big a Problem as Media Arbitrage’: Confessions of a Media Exec,” Digiday, Dec. 11, 2017, digiday.com/media/data-arbitrage-big-problem -media-arbitrage-confessions-media-exec.
18. Jack Neff, “Former Mediacom CEO Alleges Widespread U.S. Agency ‘Kickbacks,’” AdAge, March 6, 2015, adage.com/article/agency-news/mediacom-ceo-mandel-skewers-agencies-incentives/297470.
19. “An Independent Study of Media Transparency in the U.S. Advertising Industry,” K2 Intelligence, June 7, 2016, online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Transparency.pdf.
20. Jessica Davies, “Confessions of an Ex-brand Global Media Chief: ‘It’s All One Massive Arbitrage System,’” Digiday, May 23, 2017, digiday.com/media/confessions-ex-brand-global-media-chief-one-massive-arbitrage-system.
21. Seb Joseph, “Two Years After the ANA’s Report, a Cloud Still Hangs over Media Transparency,” Digiday, July 16, 2018, digiday.com/marketing/two-years-anas-report-cloud-still-hangs-media-transparency.
22. Ross Benes, “Ad Buyer, Beware: How DSPs Sometimes Play Fast and Loose,” Digiday, May 25, 2017, digiday.com/marketing/dsp-squeeze-buyers.
23. Ross Benes, “‘We Go Straight to the Publisher’: Buyers Beware of SSPs Arbitraging Inventory,” Digiday, Feb. 16, 2017, digiday.com/media/ssp-arbitrage.
24. David Pidgeon, “Where Did the Money Go? Guardian Buys Its Own Ad Inventory,” Mediatel, Oct. 4, 2016, mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2016/10/04/where-did-the-money-go-guardian-buys-its-own-ad-inventory.
25. Ronan Shields, “Rubicon Project and The Guardian Resolve Legal Dispute over ‘Hidden’ Fees,” Adweek, Oct. 12, 2018, www.adweek.com/programmatic/rubicon-project-and-the-guardian-resolve-legal-dispute-over-hidden-fees.
6. Exploding the Bubble
1. See, for example, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
2. Ibid., chap. 10.
3. See, for example, Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
4.
