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#Advertising

47 posts46 participants2 posts today

How #AI is eating the Internet…one search at a time - “Similarweb, which measures traffic to more than 100m web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic (by humans) fell by about 15% in the year to June. Although some categories, such as hobbyists’ sites, are doing fine, others have been hit hard (see chart). Many of the most affected are precisely the kind that might have commonly answered search queries. Science and education sites have lost 10% of their visitors. Reference sites have lost 15%. Health sites have lost 31%. For companies that sell advertising or subscriptions, lost visitors means lost revenue.” Source: The Economist #ArtificialIntelligence #search #SearchEngine #Google #Advertising #DigitalAdvertising #ParadigmShift #internet #tech #technology

🗨️ There's a clear discrepancy between the slogan "Disrupting power" and allowing #google advertising - so that users from #germany got the German right wing party AfD presented on the start page 🤡 (and my colleague is per definition a socialist) #clownnews

So if someone is a #thecanary indie news reader or #journalist, please do inform the #media outlet about it, I have no time for magazines using google ads to earn money. Thank you.

#uk #onlinemedia #advertising

🔹 Screenshot JUL-29 below

Love this mural based on an old Guinness advert on Sauchiehall Street Lane in Glasgow. The original advert was created by John Gilroy as part of an advertising campaign which was launched in the 1930s and featured a variety of zoo animals. This included the famous Guinness toucans (which originally started out as pelicans!). The tag-line for this campaign was My Goodness My Guinness. The road cone is, of course, a Glaswegian addition.

Like CEOs at Coldplay concerts, we keep finding malicious adtech hiding behind well-known advertising brands. While these platforms may appear credible, they allow malicious actors access to their platform, and profit from their successes.

Our posts often focus on adtech operators because they are the ones who manage the infrastructure. But they are not the only ones profiting from this business. Affiliates play a big role by driving traffic (aka visitors) to the adtech platform (TDS).

Malicious affiliates do this by tricking visitors into clicking hidden links or manipulating pages to redirect them automatically. They are so good at it that they generate a profit just due to the sheer volume of traffic they drive into the platform.

Legitimate affiliates do this by posting what they believe to be normal ads on their web pages, tempted by promises of big rewards. Unfortunately for them, this is rarely the reality, and there are many reports of affiliates being underpaid or not paid at all. Additionally, affiliates risk damaging their own brand image – no one wants their legitimate website redirecting to malware, right?

As a user, regardless of how you find yourself diverted into a malicious TDS, if you happen to fit the profile then you face the risk of being sent to a malicious landing page. Scams, disinformation, malware…you name it.

As there are many players involved in this scheme, we’ve created an infographic that highlights who they are and how they fit into the malicious adtech landscape.

Have you come across any of these shady platforms or, worse, been lured into becoming part of the scheme? Let us know!

Bleeping Computer: Google sues to disrupt BadBox 2.0 botnet infecting 10 million devices. “Google has filed a lawsuit against the anonymous operators of the Android BadBox 2.0 malware botnet, accusing them of running a global ad fraud scheme against the company’s advertising platforms.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/27/bleeping-computer-google-sues-to-disrupt-badbox-2-0-botnet-infecting-10-million-devices/

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz · Bleeping Computer: Google sues to disrupt BadBox 2.0 botnet infecting 10 million devices | ResearchBuzz: Firehose
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