
Taboola, Outbrain and the Chum Supply Chain - ksajadi
https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply
======
k1m
Here's Adblock Plus adding Taboola to their "Acceptable Ads" programme to
allow those ads to show - enabled by default when you install it:
[https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991)

If you haven't already switched, please install and encourage others to
install uBlock Origin:
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

~~~
mises
From my anecdotal experience, ublock origin is also faster. This is apparently
backed up by at least some testing: [https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-
blocking-extensions-tested...](https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-
extensions-tested-for-best-performance/view-all/)

~~~
ohashi
adblock plus is a protection racket iirc.

------
samdung
Finally, someone is talking sense about these shitty Taboola, Outbrain
clickbait ads.

I have all the reputed news sites asking me to disable adblockers only to be
shown the scum links from Taboola and Outbrain. Most times ads from Taboola
and Outbrain keep showing up even when i specifically disable those divs.

~~~
noneeeed
I am constantly surprised how many "reputable" sites stick these bottom-
feeders on their page. I feel like it must impact readers' perception of those
sites when they are trying to be all highbrow, and then the bottom of an
article is stuffed with crap that most tabloids wouldn't publish.

~~~
joaodlf
Because they have bills and wages to pay. They more than likely have tried
different methods of monetisation as well, it just didn't work as well.

Which is why this field is in dire need fir reinvention. It's terrible, but it
works. The challenge is making it work, without being terrible.

~~~
mevile
> Because they have bills and wages to pay.

That's a rationalization that works for all kinds of terrible things. It's
never good enough to excuse the behavior.

It's a terrible product, a terrible experience, and nobody benefits from it
except these companies and the people responsible for revenue at whatever
publisher is infested with these ads.

I work at an ad supported site, we trialed these things and I'm sure that any
of the journalists at places that have these things hate this crap as much as
their users do but they don't have any say over its inclusion. It's some
finance person, running the numbers.

~~~
joaodlf
So what should the "finance" person do? Stop thinking in a financial way?
Pretty sure the journalists like having a job, too.

These ads are there because they work, savvy users might not like them, you
don't, I don't. It's time for new players to step up and disrupt this market,
but not if that means a loss for businesses. That's the challenge.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Grow a backbone?

We're not talking about whether the CTA button should be light blue or dark
blue. We're talking about decision to unleash some of the worst garbage
Internet has on unsuspecting and unwilling people. It hurts individuals, and
drags down both the industry and the society at large. Someone in the company
should be able to say "no" to that.

The author of the article described some of the consequences, strongly
implying but stopping short of saying one thing out loud, so I'll say it here:
chumboxes are unethical products, and showing chumboxes is unethical behaviour
too.

(But yeah, I do understand competitive pressure. That's why I hope we
eventually get around to killing Taboola and friends through regulatory
means.)

~~~
joaodlf
> Grow a backbone?

No idea what this means from a business perspective.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Business is made of people. People are entities with conscience. Conscience,
when applied, can be a market signal.

~~~
Noos
The issue is that the web-driven model of free content is unsustainable to the
point these junk ads leading to junk sites are attractive to finance. The big
issue is that the economics of journalistic and creative content aren't
sustainable ethically any more.

I don't think anyone LIKES renting a storefront to a pawnshop, for example,
but if they are the only ones who want to rent your location, you're screwed.

Essentially ethical business would wind up needing the journalism market to
implode, ending up with a few state-subsidized outlets that could more or less
survive with no advertising at all.

~~~
troyvit
Nobody's asking why they're attractive to finance though. These ads pay for
themselves on a cost-per-click level. It isn't views that makes the money off
these ads, it's clicks. That means that people are clicking on them. What's
more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are getting
some sort of benefit from them.

~~~
ABCLAW
>What's more, people continually click on them, which implies that they are
getting some sort of benefit from them.

How do you go from "people exhibit this behaviour" to "this behaviour provides
them some benefit"?

Most of the ads are hyper-targetted to psychological weaknesses we have in the
same way that drugs hijack our reward pathways.

~~~
troyvit
Heheheh I know we spend a lot of money trying to make that happen but from
where I sit we're not that good at it yet, at least in the realm of native
advertising.

I've had plenty of people say to me (and plenty of frugality pundits write)
they had to get off of social media because they feel manipulated by their
personal network into buying crap they don't need. I've never heard somebody
say they need to opt out of Outbrain ads because of the same thing.

~~~
ABCLAW
You dispense with "they provide a benefit" and instead land on "we're not
great at being malicious yet".

Literally the top post from this comments section is someone highlighting
adblocking software to get rid of the stuff.

I get that a job is a job, but don't drink the industry kool-aid.

~~~
troyvit
Eh not quite. I said they must provide a benefit, otherwise people wouldn't
click on the stuff. You said, "No they're being manipulated into clicking on
the stuff." I responded with "Outbrain is not nearly as good at manipulating
people as social networks."

To me that means there are other reasons people are clicking on the stuff and
yeah I like to believe it's because they get some benefit from it (even if
it's the same benefit they get from watching trashy tv or reading pulp
fiction). I don't like to believe that because I think ads are awesome, I like
to believe that because it feeds my belief that people do much of what they do
out of free will. If we're puppets of corporations we're willing puppets of
corporations and blaming ad networks won't change us.

------
mehlmao
A few years ago I got really into the (ad-supported) solitaire game included
with Windows 10. I wasn't really surprised that almost all the ads were
Outbrain/Taboola type chum, targeted at senior citizens. I was surprised that
almost all of the ads were scams, promising 0% interest mortgage refinancing
or threatening that you could lose your Medicare benefits, etc. I wonder why
we haven't seen backlash towards companies hosting obviously malicious ads.

------
alex_young
Here's what I don't get: What is being exchanged of value here?

In all but one case in this analysis, the only thing that is worth something
is the click. A click not leading to a credit card transaction.

Take the case of the 5G ad. If you convince a user to click on that and then
on one of the ads on the google results, someone gets $10. Nothing of value
unless the user also has interest in the super specialized networking
equipment being sold, something that seems extraordinarily unlikely.

This is a form of fraud isn't it? You're just putting a few million page views
in the mix and calling it legitimate behavior when someone accidentally clicks
once in a while.

~~~
dwighttk
Someone eventually either buys something, or the company that's paying for the
last, most expensive, click goes out of business. But there's a lot of those
companies, so there's always (so far) someone paying for those clicks.

~~~
alex_young
In this view, the sucker is the VC? I'm not saying that's wrong, but wow.

~~~
finnh
Often, yes? Idlewords had a good post about this a few years ago:
[https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm)

~~~
troyvit
"... a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being
at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive
economic activity."

Such a great article.

------
pjc50
So I was idly wondering whether the UK Advertising Standards Authority had had
a runin with these people, and found surprisingly few examples.

[https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-
srl-a16-335037...](https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/rakuten-europe-
srl-a16-335037.html) mug with "C" handle and "UNT" body, banned

[https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-
native-...](https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/recognising-ads-native-
advertising.html) Ruling on "native advertising", mentions Outbrain ruling
[https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-
Inc-A13-251818.html](https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/Outbrain-
Inc-A13-251818.html)

~~~
dalbasal
UK ASA, is fairly toothless in general.

Where they have leverage is with TV (which submit semi-voluntarily) or where
the advertiser is regulated by another body, like financial services,
pharmaceuticals or gambling. In these cases, the regulators can and do hand
out fines based on ASA results.

It seems like their website isn't displaying all the rulings though.

------
etaioinshrdlu
I have worked in ad tech. It was fun. These types of ads were a funny joke.

I have also worked for US defense related companies. It was also fun and the
tech was top notch.

Most people's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if you
think deeply enough. Quite a shame.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Most people 's jobs in the world seem to come at someone else's expense if
> you think deeply enough. Quite a shame._

It is true. There are degrees - some of the jobs don't hurt others, and some
that do don't do it on purpose or as a primary outcome. A company making
screws and nails likely exploits only its employees.

Some are taking advantage of their customers but still deliver a basic need.
Think grocery stores that like to screw with food quality to the limit allowed
by laws and social tolerance. You don't get exactly what you think you paid
for, but it won't otherwise hurt you either.

Some jobs can involve hurting people, but at least have a somewhat plausible
justification for it. E.g. some of the defense work can be justified by just
protecting your borders and deterring attacks, and the hurt isn't realized
until some external party tries to test your defenses.

Then there are jobs that are purely about exploiting other people, without
giving them much of value. A lot of advertising is this. Chumboxes,
telemarketing, e-mail spam, native advertising, retargeting... I could go on.
It all essentially boils down to treating human beings as exploitable
resources - bags with money that you get to squeeze out by applying
psychological pressure. It does feel very much like factory farming.

(Yes, this post is sorted in descending order of what I think about
occupations. Yes, I think defense companies can be morally superior to
advertisers. The former help maintain a bubble of law and order in which we
can happily live. The latter exist to screw our lives up.)

~~~
joaodlf
Whatever makes people sleep at night :).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, I don't work or plan to work at a defense contractor, so it's not like
I'm having trouble sleeping. So far, the worst thing I can say about the work
I did in the past is that some of it was probably a waste of time and
resources to work on.

------
shedside
I sincerely hate these accursed things. Loathe them. Installed an ad blocker
with the specific intent to rid myself of them.

~~~
shpx
I hope you installed uBlock Origin and not Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not
Origin), because these people bought into the protection racket
euphemistically referred to as ""Acceptable" Ads" back in late 2014

[https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25991)

There's even a FAQ entry on the Adblock/Adblock Plus/uBlock (not Origin)
website (they're almost certainly the same company)

> "I want to support websites I love. I just don't want to see ads from
> Taboola!"

which is answered with

> We hear you. [...] We agree that Taboola (and to a somewhat lesser extent,
> Outbrain) ads aren't "acceptable." We're hopeful that now that the
> Acceptable Ads list is under the control of that third-party board, Taboola
> and Outbrain will be removed from it. We encourage you to voice your opinion
> of Taboola ads on the Acceptable Ads forum.

The Wayback machine only has it since 2018 but I think it's been there since
""acceptable" ads" was transferred to the completely-independent-and-
objective-no-hidden-agenda "third-party board" in 2017. Guess what one of the
oldest and the most viewed threads on the forum is about?

[https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/60000...](https://help.getadblock.com/support/solutions/articles/6000092027-why-
does-adblock-allow-non-intrusive-ads-)

Very crafty.

~~~
shedside
That's horrifying. But nah, I'm using 1Blocker.

------
hope_canyon
I interviewed for a role at outbrain as like a... Junior account manager or
something, before retraining as a Dev. So glad i missed that noise. I was a
tester at an agency and that was ok and worked on some cool stuff... But this
would not have been my speed at all. I didn't really know much about outbrain
when I interviewed for the job, what an eye opening article.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Always do cursory research first! There are people that unknowingly work for
adware trojan companies.

------
ablation
Easily one of the grubbiest forms of advertising on the web. Hollow, vapid and
devoid of value other than for the advertiser. "Chum" is the right word.

------
blueboo
A decade of free online news subsidized by the dying gasp of the news industry
has set us up perfectly for this.

Going forward, that subsidization will finish evaporating and the only news
media that can earn ad dollars will be either sponsored content or have chum
strewn across them. Buy gold, miracle cures, payday loan, t&a.

Expect the chum to be optimized, enhanced, and enriched.

~~~
Kadin
Or, you know, stuff people are willing to pay for. WaPo and NYT, among others,
have seemingly done okay after paywalling their content (with admittedly
relaxed rules to preserve inbound hits from Google, Twitter, etc.).

The real problem is the lack of a payments infrastructure that doesn't have
tremendously high fees for small amounts, especially small recurring payments.
I'm willing to pay for a WaPo subscription upfront, for a year, and that makes
the credit card fees acceptable on their end. But the amount I'm willing to
pay for other sites is smaller, and that probably makes it prohibitive for
them to accept credit cards directly, and there's no other good standard way
of getting paid.

Ironically Google is in the best position to do micropayments (hell they could
even do impression-based micropayments!) because it's not too dissimilar from
their ad-revenue billing. But of course they won't, because they're an
advertising company.

But the faster we kill ads, which basically means the more people who use
adblockers, the more market pressure will be created for someone to act as a
clearinghouse for small payments between content creators and consumers. And
the stuff that people aren't willing to pay for, won't be created, or will be
created only if it's someone's hobby or scratches their creative itch.

------
air7
An interesting ethical question is who in the supply chain is responsible for
the chum content, and how much. Lets assume an ad is an out-right scam of some
sort. The advertiser is obviously guilty, but is the ad aggregate to blame
(outbrain yes, adsense no)? The hosting website? (no, but their reputation
should be affected). The CDN (no, and cloudflare's attempt was censorship),
The hosting company or the domain registrar or my ISP (no) Maybe the browser
itself or the OS or my router (no) or the adblocker failing to block the ad
(yes, if it was via acceptable ads).

There are many (more) players in the "supply chain" yet we perceive their
respective responsibility differently, perhaps arbitrarily. I wrote my gut
reactions in parenthesis above, but I can't see a strong rational behind my
own sentiments.

------
flancian
I call these arbitrash.

I hate them with a passion, partly because I understand (deep down) why they
continue to exist: they sometimes work on me, in the sense that they arouse
the basest form of curiosity and I get the impulse of clicking on them. I like
myself a little less for it, even though I never actually do it.

------
hakfoo
It's about he difficulty of brands coexisting with news content. Traditional
content-based and even remarketing ads are risky to run against news articles.
Too many of them are depressing or controversial-- nobody wants to
accidentally advertise cheap flights next to a plane crash article, or
_anything_ opposite a polarizing political piece.

The chumbox advertisers, being nameless arbritrage affiliates or fly-by-night
sellers, have zero brand equity. They have very little to lose if they
accidentally get their ad running against the wrong message.

------
onemoresoop
Taboola and Outbrain are everywhere. They pretend to be:

"Taboola and outbrain are clearly filling a need in the market. There is a gap
between what publishers can monetize through their existing direct and remnant
channels, which outbrain and taboola help fill. They also provide the sites
with deeper engagement by cross linking related content that people are likely
to read."

That was funny..

With that in mind it is very interesting to note that these are both linked
with Israeli intelligence and do more than just provide third party
advertising. To me it is a good idea to block them off.

~~~
huac
I saw that they are Israeli companies, but what ties do they have to Israeli
intelligence (beyond, I suppose, that their Israeli employees had previously
done mandatory military service)?

------
joaodlf
The world of affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. A lot of
developers won't find their nirvana here, and that's understandable, but when
you abstract away the nature of this business, you get to solve some really
interesting problems.

I also believe this is an area that is still craving for real innovation and
solutions. There is a lot of money to be made here, but no one has really
"cracked" it yet, not truly.

~~~
Nextgrid
I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver?

There seems to be little legitimate money to be made and it mostly hinges on
tricks & dark patterns to mislead customers into bad deals as far as they’re
concerned.

~~~
luckylion
> I’m just wondering, what’s value does affiliate marketing deliver?

For most pages, I'd say very little to the customer, a lot to the merchant:
the merchant can't claim things about the product for legal reasons, can't
make up fake reviews/testimonials etc, so they outsource that task to the
affiliate. Of course, they don't say "just claim some bullshit", but they
accept that it's done, and it will be done because there's a lot of incentive
to do it and none to not do it.

What I'm really surprised with is the whole couponing sector of affiliate
marketing. It doesn't provide any value to the merchant, because people
typically look for coupons _after_ they've decided to buy something at a
specific store. You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and
coupons, but there's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _You may get fewer abandoned carts by offering rebates and coupons, but
> there 's no reason to pay some middleman to serve them._

It's price segmentation. There's lots of people who will not buy some types of
stuff unless they can find a deal. Coupons let you profit off those people,
sometimes enough to make it worth to pay a middleman to take care of the work
involved in distributing them.

~~~
luckylion
Sure, but you don't _need_ the middleman. You can (and some large shops do)
just publish the deals yourself. Add a /coupon/ or /voucher/ page or whatever
the local term is and put your deals there. You'll rank for it, people looking
for a deal will find it and use the "no shipping" or "5% off for new
customers" deal you provide. Same effect, only you don't pay 1-10% to some
affiliate publisher that has lots of incentive to damage your brand by
advertising coupons that don't exist etc because the he only needs the click
to get paid, leading to additional support and annoyed customers. I just don't
see the added value that an affiliate publisher generates.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You almost never _need_ a middleman. But companies, especially smaller ones,
are limited for time and attention. Someone comes in and tells you they can do
a service X for you that'll cost you Y and net you Z, Y < Z, many companies
will jump at it - Y is still much less than it'd cost them to run X themselves
(hiring people, figuring out how to do it effectively, etc.).

That it later turns out that the deal was bad for the company long-term -
well, that's the reality of business. Plenty of dishonest and exploitative
companies exist and are successful.

~~~
luckylion
Sure, but freeing resources is something that I do consider a value. In this
case, you still need to handle coupon codes, you need to create those coupons,
you need to transmit those coupons to affiliates - the only thing you don't
need to do is publish them on your own page.

It may be that some consultant talks shops into it, I just never understood
what the value proposition is. "Look, just pay somebody 5% of your revenue and
deal with annoyed customers instead of spending an hour on this once" doesn't
sound that attractive.

------
cm2012
Taboola and Outbrain type ads are what you get when you don't have good ad
targeting available. FB and Instagram ads are _much_ higher quality because of
the targeting FB offers.

------
air7
How are they different from Adsense?

~~~
notahacker
Adsense generally involves [theoretically] context-sensitive text links to
regular company websites designed to look like context-sensitive ads, whereas
Taboola/Outbrain generally involves a big box of fake news links of the
"Secret Brain Pill Used By Millionaires" type, designed to look like a list of
news content.

~~~
quickthrower2
Google are very fussy about who can advertise and what. They'll ban spammy
behavior. If your content is not relevant you pay more. If your site score is
low you pay more.

------
benj111
So what they're saying is, we follow this one simple trick? I just don't
believe that.

------
troyvit
I work for Outbrain, and I'll say upfront that, yeah, we can do better.
Advertising is advertising, and it's not the ideal way to monetize content,
but until the world finds a successful way for people to pay up for what they
enjoy it's what the industry has to work with.

That out of the way I have a few issues with this piece.

1\. Ranjan did an interesting thing that chum purveyors like us do all the
time. He lead the article with a disturbing screenshot of the lowest piece of
crap chum he could find. That draws you in to read more because who wouldn't
stare at a train wreck right? What he didn't say is that the screenshot he
showed isn't an Outbrain widget. In fact almost every recommendation in that
widget breaks Outbrain's content guidelines
([https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/](https://www.outbrain.com/amplify/guidelines/))
and would be removed from our network. Tying those ads to Outbrain is not
accurate.

2\. The block of chum below the first one, with the 5G and such? Yeah totally
Outbrain. Ranjan went through all the ads there and found none of them are
harmful. Yeah some are vapid entertainment, one is a nonsensical link to a
dying search engine, but a few of them _gasp_ are actually useful. Somehow
though the fact that people make money off of advertising is bad.

3\. None of _either_ example are worse than what you would find in the back
pages of Psychology Today or Popular Science back in the day. Those publishers
were as responsible for those ads back then as WaPo is for the chum at the
bottom of its articles today. If you read our content guidelines you'll see
that Outbrain takes that responsibility seriously. We're guests on our
publishers' pages and we never forget that.

I think this article could have gone a whole lot deeper into the terrifying
world of ad arbitrage, programmatic buying, behavioral tracking, GDPR
skirting, etc. and it would have been more meaningful, but the fact that it is
complaining that these chum buckets are as bad as display advertising in the
magazine era isn't really saying anything new.

------
tomjmarch
So these ads are largely unobtrusive and provide an extra income stream for
the WaPo - it certainly feels a bit seedy, but is this actually a bad thing?

~~~
pjc50
They're obtrusive - disturbing images of rotting teeth, etc. Taboola and
outbrain are the two places I will block at hosts file level even when not
running an adblocker simply because of how ugly their ads are.

