I used to work with Hertz at a shady Tribeca ad agency. Some schmoozy account exec had convinced them that view based conversion credit was equal to click based credit. So a programmatically bought banner ad, even unseen, had equal weight to an active customer searching and buying.
Made my media buying strategy that much more difficult. To question the scheme was verboten, view=intent was sacrosanct.
Indexing flexible sampling makes no sense to me. I realize GoogleBot sees Quora differently than a human sees it, but they could easily make back end penalties. Your site loads too slowly? Organic search penalty. Broken rendering on mobile? Penalty. So why is human inaccessible content OK?
If content is blocked to me 70% of the time, shouldn’t there be a commensurate penalty? These publishers are shitting up Google results while harvesting free traffic to goose their new user acquisition numbers.
It’s the degradation of the organic Google product experience, I’ve always been baffled why they allow it.
I used to buy millions of dollars of ads for major brands including Verizon and NBC Universal. You’re right and wrong at the same time. If Clorox accidentally bought $1MM of ads on Pornhub would it hurt their bottom line? No. It might be help it with clever creative.
It’s all about Christmas bonuses or quarterly bonuses. High level executives are notoriously conservative and DO NOT rock the boat. All it takes is enough moralizing hypocrites seeing an ad in the wrong place or emailing the company or whipping up a Twitter cancellation and suddenly their career aspirations are at risk. And they are incredibly replaceable.