Issue 14: Let's Prioritize User Experience  May 24th 2016

It’s time media companies stop focusing energy on debating the merits of ad-blocking and instead start focusing efforts on solving the biggest problem: the majority of content online is frustratingly difficult to consume, and advertisements are typically getting in the way of a great user experience not enhancing them.

When we consider that different third parties may be owned by the same entity. All of the top 5 third parties, as well as 12 of the top 20, are Google-owned domains. In fact, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are the only third-party entities present on more than 10% of sites

The newspaper publisher, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is rolling out a new ad product aimed at speeding up the response time for Web ads, particularly on mobile devices. It’s intended, in part, to help win over consumers who turned to ad blockers after being burned by lousy digital ad experiences.

Brands want to make the experience better, but when the "rubber hits the road," they still want the expanding ad running across the screen, says Cahill. "There is a disconnect between [what they say their intentions are] and the actual campaign in the real world."

Findings show that middle or bottom positioning and wording using “advertising” or “sponsored” increased advertising recognition compared to other conditions, and ad recognition generally led to more negative evaluations

Many of the popular digital news and entertainment newcomers like BuzzFeed, Fullscreen and Vice are backed or owned by some of the media dinosaurs they're trying to usurp. For example, Comcast's NBCUniversal or the company's venture-capital arm have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Tastemade, a network of food-oriented websites.

While the company is no longer using private messaging data to boost Like counts, the plaintiffs allege Facebook hasn’t stopped collecting URLs from private messages. "Facebook’s source code not only reveals that Facebook continues to acquire URL content from private messages, but that it also continues to make use of the content it acquires," the plaintiffs' attorneys wrote in a recent motion.

Nearly all of these mystery tags appear several generations deep in tag chains that sprout from the webpage and oftentimes they’re involved in programmatic advertising calls. Site operators are even less clueful about their identity than we are because they don’t have any legal relationship with a vast majority of tag providers.