Month: February 2020

Depending on the day, around 20% of its followers will view the WhatsApp status content. That’s relatively high compared with the percentage of people who view its Instagram Stories, according to Le Monde. On Instagram is has nearly 100,000 followers.

The French news publisher first used WhatsApp in November 2018 to grow its audience in African countries like Morocco, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. In France, Le Monde has 235,000 digital subscribers and 9.1 million monthly unique users in December, according to Comscore. Le Monde has 35 journalists in France and in the field covering countries in Africa.

“We wanted to reach people where there are a lot of French speakers and Le Monde doesn’t have a big presence,” said Julie Lelièvre, editorial and audience development project manager. “In these specific countries, people do not consume as we do. In order to build audiences we need to adapt how we send our information.”

WhatsApp has become a primary network to discuss and share news in non-Western countries, according to Reuters Digital News Report. In 2019, 16% of people surveyed use WhatsApp each week for news, compared with 36% who use Facebook. In non-Western countries the number of people using WhatsApp is much higher where internet connection is primarily through phones. WhatsApp as a news source has been growing since Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. The intimate nature of the platform and users’ wish to communicate in private groups rather than on newsfeeds means that publishers and brands like Adidas are working out their voice on the platform.

Le Monde had previously grown its WhatsApp following to 40,000 but had to start from scratch in December when Facebook reduced the list size people can broadcast out down to 250 people in an effort to crack down on the spread of misinformation during elections in Brazil and India.

Anyone who has that number saved can see Le Monde’s WhatsApp status. One issue with posting on its status rather than broadcasting is that people don’t get a notification when it’s updated, so the number of people viewing its content naturally falls. On the flip side, Le Monde can re-use this content on its Instagram Stories too.

Publishers had known since July 2019 of Facebook’s plans to nix wider broadcasting on the platform so Le Monde had some time to evaluate how else to foster the community it built. The publisher asked followers how else they wanted the service to continue. This led to launching on Telegram too, where it sends out three articles every night and has grown to 2,000 followers.

Using WhatsApp has gone in and out of favor with publishers. Media owners like The Guardian, Axel Springer and the Financial Times experimented on the platform three years ago. Many wound these down as the maintaining lists and publishing to the platform became more manual and Facebook imposed more restrictions.

For now, Le Monde is not looking to turn its WhatsApp followers into subscribers.

“The first goal is to grow audiences on our site and for people to know and like us,” said Lelièvre. “The second goal is we would like to drive subscribers but we’re not sure yet how that would work.”

In theory, ads.txt files help advertisers avoid illegitimate sellers who arbitrage inventory and spoof domains. The reality, however, is the files are also fertile ground for fraudsters. Since the ads.txt tool launched, fraudsters have exploited the fact that buyers don’t always check the lists with bots that generate fake browser data and create fabricated URLs in order to pilfer media spend. The latest example of this type of fraud is called the 404bot.

The 404bot is essentially domain spoofing, which is when fraudsters impersonate a publisher’s webpage. But with the 404bot ,there is no inventory. Instead, there’s a 404 error page in place of the webpage spoofed. The inventory appears like a legitimate buy from an authorized seller when in fact there’s nothing.

Since the 404bot was first noticed by Integral Ad Science in 2018, it has pilfered more than $15 million in ad spend from over 600 million ads and 1.5 billion video ads sold by large and small publishers across the U.K., the U..S, Canada and Australia. It may not sound like much given the average individual fraudster makes between $5 million and $20 million dollars a year, but the implications of the 404bot go beyond headline figures.

The existence of the 404bot is symptomatic of how ads.txt lists are being used as a plaster to ward off the symptoms of fraud rather than to help heal the cause of it.

Publishers list ad tech vendors in their ads.txt files even when they no longer work with them because they want to avoid showing ad buyers that they rely on unauthorized resellers to drive demand for their inventory. Plus, the more authorized sellers a publisher has, the more money they can potentially generate. Advertisers, on the other hand, either don’t have the internal expertise to push publishers to audit their ads.txt lists or won’t because doing so could theoretically reduce the scale of buys they could make.

Meanwhile, ads.txt files continue to get longer and subsequently become easier places for fraudsters to hide. The longer the ads.txt list, the harder it is to audit for unauthorized sellers.

“I’ve seen ads.txt lists that have more than a thousand ad tech vendors on them,” said one media executive.

Indeed, the only link between all publishers that were impersonated by the bot was that they all had long lists of ad tech vendors in their ad.txts files, according to IAS. In fact, when the ad verification firm worked with publishers to vet the exchanges selling their impressions, instances of the 404bot “weren’t as rife,” said Chappell.

“We cannot provide a specific number to define a large number of resellers, but this discovery brings the question, are publishers vetting their resellers? If they are not, it will defeat the core purpose of ads.txt’s existence,” said Chappell.

The 404bot isn’t the first time ads.txt files have been hijacked by fraudsters. Bad actors have tried to worm their way on to publisher’s ads.txt files since the tool launched in 2017.

“These types of fraud are successful because they prey on the fact that companies selling and buying media aren’t set up properly to audit what’s being traded,” said Dan Larden, managing partner of product and partnerships at programmatic agency Infectious Media. “Programmatic advertisers need to be pushing ad tech vendors for more log-level data so that they can see where the wastage is on the media that’s being bought.”

The deal was first reported by French publication Le Journal du Net and was confirmed by several sources in the French market. “We haven’t got anything further to add here as discussions are ongoing,” said a Google spokesperson. Bouygues Telecom did not respond to requests for comment.

The request for proposal, released last July, outlined an 18-month contract to develop a backend solution to store Bouygues’ targeting data, select which ad should served to which household, and redirect this information to the ad server of the TV ad sales house or other monetization partners.

The Bouygues agreement is a first of its kind for Google in Europe and could open the door for the online advertising giant to strike partnerships with other television providers elsewhere. Google also has a similar arrangement in Mexico with Totalplay Telecommunicaciones, which also offers TV packages to customers delivered over its fibre broadband network.

Total TV ad spending in France is estimated to reach just over €3.3 billion ($3.6 billion) this year, according to GroupM estimates. The French National Union of Television Advertising (SNPTV) estimates addressable TV could grow the total TV ad market in France by a further €200 million ($217 million) by 2022. While that’s a drop in the ocean for Google, whose parent company Alphabet generated $137 billion in revenue last year, the strength of its wider ad business and salesforce could see it giving traditional TV advertising players a run for their money.

A source who previously worked at an ad tech company that had been in early discussions about the Bouygues addressable ad contract said Google’s incentive for this particular deal isn’t financial, but rather a way for Google to enter into the TV business and have case studies it can take to other companies and countries.

Around half of households in France consume TV through a set-top box — Bouygues uses the Android TV set-top box.From this year, France’s advertising rules are also set to be relaxed to allow a set amount of targeted TV ads per hour within the commercial breaks on linear broadcasts. Bouygues had a total of 3.9 million “fixed” customers as of 31 Dec. 2019, though not all of those will have set-top boxes with the capabilities to deliver addressable TV advertising.

“The situation is tense in the market right now,” as broadcasters in France are uncomfortable that internet service providers could start creating their own TV ad sales units, chipping away at their sales houses, said a source at a different global ad tech company that had also vied for the Bouygues contract.

“Everyone is worried that the situation with Bouygues would give Google access to linear inventory … [and,] in the long run, [Google could] take a good share of this market and also force broadcasters to use their ad tech to monetize everything,” the source said.

A French media buyer said French broadcasters will be making a “big mistake” if they think they can be the only players to monetize targeted audience data on TV. (Bouygues also owns the largest French broadcaster, TF1, which recently struck a deal with The Trade Desk to make some of its non-primetime linear inventory available to buy via agency trading desks.)

“If you don’t have data on the sell-side and the buy-side, it won’t work,” said the buyer. “Buyers need to have data from the telco and to be able to forecast and have a common currency with the sell-side — this is where Google is thinking of second or third steps.”

Still, Google may face resistance, according to Daniel Gilbert, CEO of performance marketing agency Brainlabs.

“Anti-Google sentiments are strong and will keep many from working with Google — at least until they see better results,” Gilbert said. “The market will need to adjust, and a lot of money to invest. Addressable TV will take some time to take off in Europe, but TV companies looking to compete with Google will need to move fast.”