Pace Notes

A peer-reviewed study presented at ACM's Internet Measurement Conference found that 17 of the 18 biggest identity vendors in programmatic handed IDs to the HTTP Archive crawler, a public research bot that announces itself in every request and has sat on the IAB Tech Lab's own Spiders and Bots list since 2013. Only Flashtalking answered "Bot." LiveIntent, ID5, Criteo, Experian's Audigent, The Trade Desk, PubMatic, OpenX and Magnite's Rubicon all issued it a lanyard.

This is not a clever fraud ring. It is the least stealthy bot on Earth, and its data sits in a free public database any vendor could have queried any day of the last three years. One Audigent ID followed it across 29,770 websites. 85% of LiveIntent's persistent IDs were shared by its phone and desktop crawls, two "devices" whose only connection is a Google Cloud IP pool. A cross-device graph made of server racks.

Here is why it keeps happening. An ID on a bid request raises the bid. Publishers adopted ID bridging for yield, vendors win on coverage, and nobody in the chain gets paid to return a blank. And the Media Rating Council says it does not audit or accredit identity providers at all. Kean Graham of MonetizeMore, whose LinkedIn graphic made the paper go viral, put it in seven words: "Nothing in their incentive structure punishes it."

In 2010 this site asked what counted as ad fraud and the industry shrugged. Sixteen years later it still can't agree on a definition. It has just gotten very good at pricing the bot as a person.

Vizio sells advertisers "glass-level" ACR data. Its last annual report to the SEC, filed before Walmart bought it, says some content agreements, including Netflix and Disney+, restrict it from using viewing data from people watching that content. LG said in September that its ACR does not operate inside third-party apps like Netflix or YouTube. A 2024 peer-reviewed lab test watched LG's ACR traffic drop to idle levels inside those apps.

That matters because Netflix and YouTube are more than a fifth of US TV viewing by Nielsen's own count, and ACR is the exposure file under a large share of CTV attribution. If the TV can't see the app, the ad seen inside it never makes the "exposed" group, and the lift math gets graded against a control group full of people who actually saw the ad. Nobody on the report can tell you by how much.

To be fair to the TV makers, as one longtime source told ADOTAT, the privacy pages aren't lying. The slogans are doing the work. Buyers don't read privacy pages. They read slogans. Ask your vendor which apps it can't see, and get the answer in writing before the next invoice.

Samsung, LG Ad Solutions, Vizio, Roku, Samba TV and TVision did not respond to ADOTAT's questions. Five companies that sell what the TV sees, and none would say what it doesn't.

Nielsen's Gauge gave YouTube a record 14.2% of all TV time in July. That number is "YouTube Main" only. Since February 2023, live channels watched through virtual pay-TV apps like YouTube TV, Sling and Hulu Live have been credited to broadcast and cable, not streaming.

So an ESPN game watched on YouTube TV adds to Disney's total, not Google's. Google pays Disney carriage fees, and then the minutes go to Disney too. The last time Nielsen broke that viewing out, in November 2022, it was 5.8% of all television. It hasn't been printed since.

Inside one YouTube TV hour it gets stranger. The network's national ads count as linear TV. The two minutes an hour the distributor fills by dynamic insertion count as CTV. Same couch, same remote, two different media.

None of this is wrong. It's a convention, and the convention is defensible. But conventions have beneficiaries, and when a chart says linear holds most of TV ad time, part of that lead arrived over the internet.

The Trade Desk reports third-quarter results on Nov. 9, after the close. It guided to at least $650 million in revenue and about $160 million in adjusted EBITDA. The Zacks consensus puts revenue near $650.7 million, down about 12% from a year ago. Last quarter revenue grew 3%, the adjusted EBITDA margin fell from 39% to 34%, and the company is cutting roughly 15% of its workforce, with $39 million to $51 million in cash restructuring charges in this quarter.

The bull case is CTV and retail media: CTV revenue outside North America grew more than 50% in Q2. The bear case is everything ADOTAT has been writing for two months. Apple wrote the rules for The Trade Desk's Safari traffic, the stock options got reset, and when Publicis bought LiveRamp, The Trade Desk was the one charging the toll. This week it turned up on the list of identity vendors that handed a declared bot an ID.

For a decade The Trade Desk sold itself as the independent alternative to the walled gardens. On Nov. 9 it gets graded on whether it can be an alternative to itself. Listen for three words on the call: identity, Safari and fees. If none of them comes up, that's the answer.