VidMe

2021年8月4日

鏈接腐敗為出版商努力掌握品牌安全提供了一個新的角度。報紙已經把自己擁有和運營的網站的質量性質作為他們向廣告商推銷的一個關鍵部分。但互聯網的短暫性不斷在合法渠道上出現不安全內容的意外情況——從長遠來看，這可能是非常昂貴的。多年來，品牌安全一直是最重要的議題。在關於什麼構成仇恨言論的長期鬥爭和不透明的在線廣告實踐問題之間，廣告經常與有害內容一起出現。觀眾和潛在消費者大多不了解買賣媒體的技術層麵，對這些情況反應很差。因此，如果不能確保你的廣告出現在品牌安全的環境中，就會對品牌的底線產生真正的影響。新聞出版商的網站應該是一個安全的廣告環境;這通常是他們的主控板和其他廣告格式的關鍵賣點之一。事實上，今年1月，Reach PLC進行了一項研究，證明一項調查的受訪者認為新聞網站是在線廣告的安全環境。Reach Solutions的市場洞察和品牌戰略總監安德魯·坦澤(Andrew Tenzer)稱，這是“無可辯駁的證據”，表明“質量環境與品牌安全同樣重要，甚至更重要”。 Yet last month sites including The Washington Post, New York Magazine and Kotaku found themselves featuring hardcore porn from adult network 5 Star Porn HD. It wasn’t to illustrate an article or as the result of any malice, but because the network had bought up defunct video platform Vidme, which those sites had used to embed other video content into article pages. Many of the affected articles were taken down and had the embed code stripped out or disabled swiftly, but for a while advertisements were running alongside hardcore porn on those news sites. It’s a similar situation to that which occurs when news sites embed tweets – often without asking for permission – and the user either deletes the tweet or otherwise makes a change outside of the publisher’s control. Worse, some solutions to the issue of brand safety on publishers’ sites rely on third-party tools that often disagree about what counts as ‘safe’. Some research even demonstrated that Comscore and Moat’s brand safety tech is only in agreement around 60% of the time when classifying an article as safe or unsafe. While the Vidme situation is an outlier, notable for the type of content that was accidentally embedded, it is indicative of a much larger brand safety issue – that of link rot. The danger of ephemera A 2016 study found that fully 75% of deep links for scholarly content no longer pointed to the information cited in the copy. While that’s bad for academia, it also has an impact on the way that newspapers back up their articles, link internally and ultimately how they perform in search results. Researcher Jonathan Zittrain found that even the largest English-language publishers were susceptible to this link drift over time: “With John Bowers and Clare Stanton, and the kind cooperation of The New York Times, I was able to analyze approximately 2m externally-facing links found in articles at nytimes.com since its inception in 1996. We found that 25% of deep links have rotted. The older the article, the less likely it is that the links work. If you go back to 1998, 72% of the links are dead. Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.” Efforts to immortalize the web are ongoing and vital for our understanding of the internet as a social tool – but those efforts offer nothing to the brands whose marketing messages end up on pages with dead or otherwise unsafe links. Worse still is when previously reliable embeds end up serving content that is horribly unsafe, as with the Vidme situation. Even when the situation is relatively humorous, as when Donald Trump was caught out by an expired link being redirected , it underlines the fact that newspapers’ sites require constant upkeep if they are to retain their brand-safe reputation. So while research like Reach’s indicates that consumers believe newspapers’ sites are safe environments on which to advertise, the ephemeral nature of links and embeds undercut that belief. As Zittrain’s study demonstrated, the issue of link rot grows over time. It will be a costly fix for news publishers to police the growing number of pages exposed to these problems – but potentially costlier if a brand safety breach occurs.