Given how rampant ad fraud is in programmatic, I wonder how much revenue actually drops for these companies, relative to the decreased ad spend.
Uber’s [1] experience is one example:
“We turned off two thirds of our ad spend – $100m out of annual spend of $150m – and basically saw no change in our number of rider app installs. What we saw is a lot of installs we thought had come through paid channels suddenly came through organic.”
Even without ad fraud, you have things like user wants to install Uber, so searches for Uber in a web search. First link on the page is an ad to install Uber, maybe a couple more ads, then first organic search result is a link to the Uber home page, and maybe the second result is to install it. If the ad weren't there, the user would probably install organically, but since it's there and at the top of the page, it's likely to get clicked and cost money.
How is that fucked up? There's a certain number of slots, and someone is going to fill them. It's like in a grocery store. If Kellogg's doesn't offer Kroger a price they like, they'll just stock General Mills instead... that's just business.
Uber’s [1] experience is one example:
“We turned off two thirds of our ad spend – $100m out of annual spend of $150m – and basically saw no change in our number of rider app installs. What we saw is a lot of installs we thought had come through paid channels suddenly came through organic.”
[1] https://mackgrenfell.com/blog/how-did-uber-waste-so-much-ad-...