Investigating Google's Ad Business

In my previous newsletter, I outlined 5 free tools you can use to investigate digital ads. Then I kind of disappeared for a year...

My excuse is I spent a good part of that time investigating the biggest digital ad business in the world: Google. My colleagues and I tried to crack open the black box that is Google’s ad business. Here’s what we found:

• Porn, Piracy, Fraud: What Lurks Inside Google’s Black Box Ad Empire

• How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World

• Methodology article: How We Determined Which Disinformation Publishers Profit From Google’s Ad Systems

• Google Says It Bans Gun Ads. It Actually Makes Money From Them

• Google Allowed a Sanctioned Russian Ad Company to Harvest User Data for Months

In this newsletter I’ll explain how I used one of the tools mentioned in my previous newsletter (plus a couple of others) to uncover a large piracy scheme making money with Google ads. I’ll outline the methodology I used to find hundreds of apparent piracy sites working with a single company, and how I used Google’s own data to show that these sites engage in mass copyright infringement.

Hopefully this reinforces why digital ads are worth investigating and provides a concrete example of how to do it. In case it’s not already clear, I’m on a mission to get journalists and researchers to dig into the murky, fraud filled business of digital ads. Contact me if I can help!

Subscribe to Indicator to read the rest.