upvote
Disney (CTV) doesn't take any open auction demand. All their programmatic demand is deals - meaning that they carefully plan those campaigns with highly reputable agencies and advertisers. There is zero chance for a contentious scammy crypto exchange ad (or even a moderately innocent crypto wallet one) to show on their properties.

Which you can absolutely do, when you are Disney (read, agencies fight to run a campaign with you). When you are, let's say, TechCrunch, the situation changes - you can still strike some deals but a lot of your demand is not the same grade.

reply
One economic consequence is advertising gets expensive and limited to big players, like on TV. Make of that what you will.
reply
No, it just means it costs more and you have to care a lot more about targeting.
reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeadOn My strongest argument that ads were never properly vetted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy There's whole sections of homeopathy in stores. So it's still occurring.
reply
Late night infomercials for get rich quick scams and spam fax machine ads were all over the place by the late '80s sadly.
reply
You clearly misunderstand the sheer scale of online advertising (compared to linear TV ads, magazine ads etc). There is no chance you can vet every single creative and a landing page (one public number is 30B daily ads just served by Google alone in 2012 - which is probably closer in spirit to the Punic Wars than to 2026).

That's the first point. Now, who should be responsible for getting the ads? The website? That will absolutely kill the monetization model and it is simply unrealistic. Which means, that responsibility now should be pinned on someone else. Who would that be? My point being that no one there has an inherent lawful obligation to provide such vetting, which would be a) costly and b) only applicable to one player (out of many).

And then we get to bad actors. If I were a really motivated bad actor as early as in 2005, I was serving different creatives and different landing pages to different audiences - a perfectly well-behaved ones to Google's crawlers (again, Google does A LOT to fight malware), a questionable quality clicky ones to general audiences and maybe malware-ridden ones to specifically targeted audiences. And you would not be able to catch me in real time - only after the fact, once the campaign was run and someone looked at the evidence (assuming it was collected, which it isn't normally)

reply
> 30B daily ads just served by Google

I'm assuming that means ad impressions and not unique ads.

reply
You have to be specific what you mean by "ads" then. If you mean creatives that ultimately rendered - you are absolutely correct. I don't have any stats handy to check the ratio between the two to estimate the number of unique creatives, but I believe it is a) several orders of magnitude smaller but b) still very very large.

And again, we are talking about logical creative (the actual visible part). Click URLs and such will definitely be different.

reply
If it is indeed impossible to vet all the traffic passing through your networks, then perhaps your networks' existence is itself the issue. Maybe it is indeed not possible to vet 30 billion ads, just like it's difficult for Facebook to moderate all 3 billion users.

Perhaps the actual problem then are these monolith platforms that have done such a good job "eating the world" that they can no longer properly function.

reply
If you really read what I wrote above - there is no "monolith" (and yes, Google is everyone's favorite Boogeyman). AdTech is a primordial pool all kinds of actors, each of which has found a profitable niche to "add value" (or to bullshit partners about "adding value").
reply
I spoke of the network in specific. Whether we're discussing one firm dumping industrial quantities of sewage into the internet, or 10,000 tiny ones, doesn't really change at all that there's industrial quantities of sewage.

I'm critically uninterested in the fictions of the business idiot class. I'm sure for many purposes it's important for all the papers to have the proper LLC's on them. For the purpose of burning it to the ground though, it's not overly important.

reply
it has to be the website to start with; if the website is hosting malware, then it's the website's problem. Soon after that's implemented, the adtech companies will begin competing to solve the website's problem by promising clean, malware free ads, and will begin aggressively vetting ads. The monetization model will be preserved and the incentives will be properly aligned.

There is no universe in which 'gosh it's just too hard' is the correct answer.

reply