> A chumbox or chumbucket is a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages. This form of advertising is often associated with low quality "clickbait" links and articles. The term derives from the fishing practice of "chumming", the use of fish meat as a lure for fish.
This word is used in the article and while I’m quite familiar with the thing, I didn’t know it had a name. Very fitting for the low-quality content that it contains!
In case it's not obvious, Taboola hasn't been making money by connecting people to content they want to read, but rather by selling passive tracking data.
If a browser goes to ten sites which have Taboola boxes on them, then Taboola can sell the history of that cookie and its browsing history to a targeting company. If the targeting company has a cookie of its own in the same place as a chumbox then the company is able to map everything Taboola knows to everything they know.
Given the efforts of Apple, Google and Mozilla to choke off this type of tech (third party cookie tracking) it's interesting their valuation is this high. I guess they can still make much of counting anonymous visits and mapping them back to IPs for sale.
Not that they don't do this but I'm not sure selling data is their main source of money. I think their ad placements are actually that valuable. Click-bait sells extremely well when it's manipulative enough and displayed to a wealthy demographic. About 10 years ago you would pay $.1 to $1 for a click from a soccer mom on Fox News. That's not search ads, that $1 per non-targeted display ad click. Which was insane back then, not sure now. I've also not touched ads for a decade so maybe I'm just behind the times.
Edit: I actually credit Taboola and Outbrain with being the enablers of actual "fake news". There was a time when you could make a landing page that looks like the NYT, put an "advertisement" disclaimer in gray letters and 9pt font somewhere, and blast it on Taboola so people buy your supplements. Taboola was fully aware, just loved the money too much.
>"Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations."
Oh god no. If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.
>"While Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations, Singolda says the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation to ensure that every piece of content on its site is approved."
I use uBlock Origin religiously, but from what I can tell most Taboola recommendations are the same 15 or so clickbait topics repeated ad infinitum. Woman mid shout, guy holding credit card, lotus fruit, some weird berry that's supposed to cure something, skin disorder, etc.
Well hopefully we can figure out ways to integrate advertising so deeply into every aspect of our lives that you can no longer escape marketing with pi holes and hammers. Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business. Filling up your car with gas? Fill your mind with ads while you do it! Imagine glasses that show augmented-reality ads based on your current location and what you are looking at, that would be incredible. Any place people rest their eyeballs should contain ads. Digital picture frames that show family photos in your home should occasionally flash ads, etc. Hopefully the National Park Service can install some satellite base stations so that hikers and campers can get the urgent advertising they need to be aware of the latest survival gear while out in nature. Basically, we need to prevent people from having quiet time and thinking - we need to come with as many ways as possible to aggressively interrupt and intrude thoughts with gentle reminders that the economy needs stimulating and that the only way to truly be happy is with more stuff.
Some public schools sell as space on their students' lockers.
Remember, any moment of attention can be monetized through advertising - and therefore it should be. Any tine a person is thinking their own thoughts is a wasted opportunity.
Fareway, a grocery store headquartered in Iowa with stores in Iowa and all surrounding states except Wisconsin, has tablets in the checkout queue area with a camera to show ads. I'm not sure if they just use tablets as a low cost device with a screen and internet connection, or if they're determining demographic info from the video (and possibly correlating it to transactions at the POS).
They definitely are or will be soon. From their own blog:
>Thanks to the computer vision technology built into every one of our displays, we can track metrics previously limited to online advertising. For example, impressions are the standard currency for online advertising, but they aren’t yet the norm in the DOOH industry and when they are provided they’re a rough estimate. Unlike most DOOH displays, Popspots displays only run content when consumers are physically present, which means there’s a direct relation between plays and
impressions. Popspots displays also count the number of consumers present and whether they’re watching the advertisement on a second-by-second basis. Using this data, marketers can understand exactly how many consumers they’ve reached and assess the effectiveness of their creative.
I met one of their VP's and had a good 30 minute chat once. Budget ethos is definitely there. Outside of advertisements during the Iowa high school Athletics events, they didn't really spend on TV ads until ~2-3 years ago when competition with ALDI and Hy-Vee seemed to dramatically increase.
No idea on the business model for the ad tablet system, but I could see a model where they pay an amount to the store on a monthly basis. Perhaps they would pay more if the store would turn over transaction data, or the transaction data and demographics would be traded as mutually beneficial.
They're very much not on the cutting edge of technology. I believe she said they didn't have email until ~2010. Store orders were submitted via fax to their distribution center.
In some ways they're saving money (only looking at mature options in the market and absolutely avoiding snake oil salesmen), but even an Excel based ordering system on a dialup connection would have been a major labor savings for 2000-2010 compared to faxes.
My corner gas station just rolled out new machines that start playing advertisements on the LCD screens as soon as the pump starts dispensing gas. It made me irrationally angry. One, that I have to deal with even more mental pollution in my daily life. And two, that the person who created this business model realized that pump-goers are quite literally a captive audience and that's the best way to force someone to watch an ad.
I complained to the manager and I've never been back. Sadly, part of me knows it's just a matter of time before other gas stations gets these new machines.
Most of the gas pumps with ads I’ve seen are the kind with 4 arrow buttons on either side. If you push the 2nd button down on the right side, it’ll mute the audio, and you can go back to listening to traffic and breathing fumes in peace.
Unfortunately, some gas stations have already disabled the mute button; in my personal experience, Speedway was the first in doing that. It's only a matter of time 'til all stations do that.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but most new gas cars are the same. New Toyotas have it, GM has had it for quite a while with OnStar, Ford probably has it, and if I bothered to dig more, almost all of them have it somewhere, cellular modem included.
It's an industry problem at this point, and I really think some day we will have a mass terrorist disaster where some psychotic hacker group would hack all the badly secured cars everywhere, link into the CAN bus (because that is a GREAT idea for some braindead synergistic middle manager reasons) and cause run-away accelerations simultaneously everywhere on some clock script, killing millions and destroying trillions.
I'm 50/50 hoping someone makes a popular movie about that, to scare governments world wide to force cars to have a fucking no network mode and no connections to the CAN bus and terrified if it would inspire said teenage psychopaths to do so...
You could stand there and be the captive audience you complain about, or you could choose to do something more productive with your life. Take the time it takes to fill up your tank to clean the windows, check the oil level in your car, check the air pressure in your tires, or just inspect the tires for wear patterns, etc.
That's what a tube of chapstick is for. My dad's been doing that for >50yrs, and I have continued the tradition at gas stations that remove the trigger lock.
You joke but I can see the hiker thing with one click purchase and instant drone delivery becoming a popular service. You won’t even have to prepare or carry anything with you to go into the wild.
Most pumps around here will mute the sound by pressing the right button, second from the top, beside the screen. Some pumps require a different button to mute so I just spam all the buttons around the screen if at a new station. They are incredibly loud and obnoxious sometimes.
> Imagine using a public urinal and you can watch an LCD screen while taking care of business.
Paper ads at the urinal are already common in some countries, because advertisers know that you have no choice but to look straight ahead. Now that you mention it, it is surprising that LCDs haven't been installed yet.
I remember seeing video screens above the urinals in a parking garage in Maastricht, Netherlands some time between 2004 and 2006. They primarily showed ads, but also had a camera pointed at you, so you'd be watching an ad and then it would switch to showing your face. The camera also tilted and would begin tilting down. It would get your heart racing, but it only tilted down a few degrees before it tilted back up so it never showed your dangley bits.
A few years ago Delta started force-feeding adverts to me pre-takeoff on the seatback screens. Pressing the off button turned it off for a moment, then it turned back on to continue the advert.
That happened once, I haven't flown with them since. I don't look forward for the day when I will no longer have that option.
Don’t do that. Use it as spare parts for a new project.
When the screens do come out they’ll probably run some flavour of android so it might be flashable.
The hacker part of this website would investigate taking the LCD screen out, and repurposing it. We all know that DIY robot that goes to the fridge to bring you a snack will need some sort of LCD screen to act as an interface for you to choose the snack. It's not like we're going to use an iPad for that. We're too busy putting those in our cars.
Don’t, they’ll add some routine that makes you tap on some “agree” button and shut down the whole darn thing otherwise... I have an idea: under the perverse excuse of delivering firmware updates for your own network safety!!!
Hmm, the plot of Brazil becomes every day more realistic. Ah, what times were living!
My experience with modern refrigerators tells me that the fridge will likely _not_ continue to keep your food cold after the crappy display fails, whether by hammer or otherwise.
The ad industry is prepared for this. DNS-over-HTTPS will ignore your PiHole, and lovingly bring you ads anyways. While you can turn DoH off in your browser, your IoT device will not be so configurable. And will most likely fail to work entirely if you block access to Google's DoH endpoint.
DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic, and by and large, the majority of tech enthusiasts have cheered for it.
It'll be an arms race. DNS-based blackholes would give way to IP-by-IP firewall rules.
I remember when personal firewalls were mostly about blocking threats coming in through incoming connections. Now, I use mine more to block threats already on my network from exfiltrating through outgoing connections.
DoH removes the agency of the network provider. This is great if you can't trust the network.
If I used my ISPs DNS resolver it wouldn't allow me to access sci-hub. I can trivially use Googles DNS, but if that where to change DoH would save me.
The other problem is solvable by not buying an IOT device with a screen. I can't buy a dumb TV, but I do okay with my current one and my computer monitor.
This is only partially true: You are also, more than likely, your own network provider too. So unless you have full control over devices on your network (including closed source IoT devices), it takes away your agency as well.
So it's terrible, unless you can trust every device on your network.
> DoH is an incredibly user hostile technology designed to remove your agency to control your network traffic
I view it as more of a double-edged sword. It can be very handy if you have a hostile ISP playing shenanigans with DNS or logging your queries and selling the data, but as you point out, it's also useful for bad actors as well.
I'd say on average, tech companies pushing DoH like Google, Cloudflare, and Mozilla, are using the excuse of hostile ISPs, knowing that the primary goal is to defeat enterprise security and ad blocking.
I mean, sure, Google's worried about your ISP logging your queries and selling the data... because that would compete with Google's business of logging your web activity and selling ads based on it. DoH isn't a privacy technology at that point, it's a anti-competition play.
You're confusing DoH in "friendly" browsers like Firefox, where you and I might deliberately turn it on to thwart ISP shenanigans. In that case, it's good that DoH is hard to filter and looks like all other TLS traffic.
But the parent is correctly describing DoH as a double-edged sword. The same properties that make it good for you and me when trying to safely access domain data make it a weapon for rogue IoT devices who want to do the same.
Your smart fridge could easily include software that allows it to acquire its own secure DNS info from a DoH network run by the smart fridge manufacturer. This would allow them to find the domains behind the chumbox ads that they want to show you in spite of your PiHole. Since the manufacturer would be doing this to get around a user's desired network configuration, it'll be configurable for them, not for you. You will not be the "owner" of this device.
Unencrypted DNS can be redirected or inspected and selectively blocked. DoH cannot, and whereas you can selectively tamper with DNS requests to remove advertisers, devices may fail to work at all if you block their DoH provider.
On a properly-configured network, all DNS requests are intercepted and routed to the desired DNS server. I do this to make Google devices respect my DNS preferences (send DNS through PiHole) instead of using their hardcoded setting.
DoH can be enforced by user-hostile devices and applications.
Including Internet-of-shit infested appliances and devices.
With 5G SIMS embedded and financed at rock-bottom mass-contract data-dribble rates via advertising, other revenue flow, or up-front / ongoing purchase revenue streams, WiFi LAN egress controls --- PiHole or other DNS blocklists, or IP and protocol firewalls --- simply won't be effective.
> If chumbox advertising gets integrated into IoT devices I'm getting a PiHole for my sanity.
I tend to think of something like this as more of a “move to a cabin in the woods” scenario, but I suppose that could be a workable compromise.
In all seriousness, I’m morbidly curious as to how chumbox “technology” would apply to TV show and whatever kind of “content” recommendations would go on a smart fridge. Viscerally unsettling thumbnails that have tested for maximum conversion? Perfect for the kitchen!
I bought a Pi Zero W awhile back and it sat in my desk for like a year. While going through my desk about a month ago I decided to take 10 minutes to set it up and regret not doing it sooner! The little thing is pretty amazing. I've since moved the Pi Zero W to my travel bag paired with my travel modem and upgraded to a regular Pi at home!
People like nice clean looking kitchens. A kitchen with a display flashing crap does not fit into that.
I'm sure some percentage of fridges will have displays flashing shitty adverts all day long, but there will be a large number of fridges that are just decent looking boxes with stainless, black, or white doors.
With TVs I'm afraid we're screwed though. Adding a brain and wifi to a TV is super cheap now and manufacturers have already figured out how to monetize having a smart TV in your house even without advertising.
My Samsung TV has built in ads, which I HATE. I want a dumb TV. Apps built into TVs generally suck because to keep the BOM cost down they put in the cheapest SoC that will function, leaving the apps sluggish, jerky, and frequently cut down in features. On my previous LG TV I couldn't turn off motion smoothing on the bui8lt in video streaming apps. With the Samsung TV I just don't connect it to the network because there are ads that you cannot disable.
My fridge uses DRM to check the filter. I’m sure they won’t forget the doors. And I bet they’ll be attached via some obscure proprietary screwdriver head that’s unavailable to the public.
Taboola and Outbrain have disgusting products. Their recommendations lead to content that is sketchy at best, and their business model is to pry on the unsuspecting at scale. I would say there is no harm done in wasting people's time here and there, but I bet they're hyper-agressive in data collection and privacy violations.
These types of companies are the very definition of extractive elite: they provide close to nothing of value and yet soak up a bunch of profits in the hands of a few.
I'd be happy to hear someone refute my claims, especially the latter.
If you see sketchy ads on a website that's not supposed to be sketchy. Its probably taboola or outbrain. They often use near NSFW images (sexual & gore) in their click baits. I remember a few years ago, they'd also install malware on your system to change the default search engine to a Google lookalike. There were numerous articles online on "how to remove taboola malware".
This company should be sued to death instead of going public. Our slow to catch up legislation is to blame.
I couldn't upvote this enough. But if you know Adam a little bit as I do, you would know he is a perfect fit for a slimy garbage Taboola and Outbrain are delivering. Its not a surprise really. And mostly its snake oils sales crap that eventually should be outright banned.
They embed their ads on news sites, style them to look like legitimate articles, and prey on the vulnerable. Same methodology as the "your Social Security number has been suspended" scam calls.
Who pays to have their ads displayed by a chumbox? Probably smaller players but I can't imagine a reputable company to post ads in that toxic environment, it really does look bad.
Major new sites, mostly magazine publishers, were doing this. Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, and CNN as I recall. Five-thirt-eight according to comments here. Some may have dropped them by now, many were discussing this as negative brand value within recent years.
They're talking about the other end of things - the companies placing ads, not the ones hosting them.
The answer is "sleazy bottomfeeders", if the Taboola ads I've seen are any indication. Supplements, worthless insurance, colon cleansers, and the like.
That is correct. I've seen tabula/outbrain around on cnn/bbc/time etc until I blocked it and am aware that these publishers make use of taboola/outbrain for revenue. However, I was wondering what company puts the actual advert through these deceptive bottomfeeders.
Ad arbitrage - essentially buy a click on Taboola for $0.20 and send the user to your sham website that displays ads from a separate network (Ad sense, Facebook, or one of the seedier options) and hope you get that user to click an ad that pays you $0.22. Make a little bit of money while making the world a little bit worse.
Taboola, Outbrain, et al are the bottom of the barrel as it relates to the space of monetized and amplified content recommendations.
Literal clickbait designed to pray on the poorly informed.
From an advertising perspective, their targeting "AI" is nonsense.
The fact that they are cashing out isn't upsetting. The fact that countless, I would assume tens of millions of users, have been duped to click on this drudge is most disheartening.
I still don't understand why publishers use these ads. At best they annoy your readers. At worst people leave your site and give revenue or eyeballs somewhere else. Since publishers are in the impression business, shouldn't they be selling ads that make revenue by impression instead of by click? My dream is for publishers to wise up suddenly, leaving Taboola and its underwriters holding the bag.
They pay you a promised amount to clutter your website with their horseshit beyond a certain point because your data becomes the commodity being bought just not transparently. Now make the case constantly to get rid of the free cash by showing it's negative impact on brand and revenue. I hope that one day they are all gone but it will be awhile still...
For big sites, you can negotiate 80% revshare + guaranteed minimums. This is huge for smoothing out cash-flow in low CPM quarters and is one of the most valuable ad slots available to pubs
At best someone accidentally clicks on one of the little adverts and you earn $0.01. On a busy site, accidental clicks alone have to earn a few dollars a day.
Pump your stock price with this one weird trick (Hint: it's lying).
> He says the company's main competition is "anyone in business of offering software revenue tools to publishers," including CMS providers, email servers, etc.
> Singolda tells Axios that he sees any sort of open web device, whether it being a smart refrigerator or a smart TV, one day being able to use Taboola's technology to power content recommendations.
> Taboola relies mostly on artificial intelligence to power content recommendations
I'd say it's more like they're getting search data from Google.
eg: I search on some medical condition (which I might or might not have) and the next thing I know, all Taboola 'chumbox' blocks are littered with 'ads' (which aren't ads that 'sell' anything) about said condition. Just extremely low quality links with zero value.
It would be pretty shocking if Google were sharing search data with anyone, let alone Taboola.
Others in this thread mentioned that Taboola used to have literal malware that would replace Google with a google-lookalike. Maybe you have that malware?
If there is any company in the world that should be burned to the ground for the sake of all humanity, Taboola is definitely one of them. Outbrain is the other. I wish they had actually merged to save us the time of destroying both.
Their product is horrible and without redemption. But let me make it clear that the people that work there are also as horrible - try criticizing them on Twitter and watch the bots and employees attack.
They provide nothing of any value in any way whatsoever. It's pure scam. If they disappeared tomorrow the world would literally become a better place in real, measurable ways.
I've had a PiHole set up for years explicitly to block them. No other service I can imagine is built on such lies, falsehoods, deceit and fraud. They are pure garbage. Hatred doesn't even begin to describe my antipathy towards them.
Taboola and Outbrain were nearly the same company. A merger announced in 2019 fell through. Invalidating my "Save a match with this one weird trick!" joke.
Just adding to the dogpile here, but Taboola and Outbrain are the absolute scum of the Earth.
Google, Facebook, and others get a lot of justified criticism for abusive business practices and invasion of privacy, but at least they also provide some kind of arguably valuable service in return. Taboola and Outbrain on the other hand are malignant parasites, utterly devoid of any imaginable redeeming qualities.
If I could flip a switch and erase both companies from existence, I would absolutely do it without a moment's hesitation.
I am being harsh, but this company is the equivalent of a chemical company that poisons the river. Sure, there's a benefit of revenue for publishers (powering journalism and other writing / photography / video), but it's so obnoxious and no where near anyone's idea of a worthwhile content. It's like praising litter for having been the product of a sale, benefiting whoever.
I like this analogy a lot. Nature has a special place for us so conservation is (mostly) obvious, including ideas like negative externalities. But I agree with you that we should be thinking of the online world in the same way, even if its not as existential as a clean environment. Companies that profit by destroying the value of the web, like Taboola and other listicle or content farms should be held accountable for lowering the internet's quality for everyone.
Taboola relies on the open web for its existence, but by littering it with their garbage for a quick buck they are contributing to drive people towards walled gardens. It's a self-destructive company. It reminds me of this fishing technique where they scrape the whole ocean floor with huge nets, slowly destroying the whole ecosystem in order to get a few more low quality fish.
Taboola, Zergnet, Outbrain, and the like are half the reason I run a pihole. These companies and their ilk promote the worst of the worst of clickbait.
Oh wow didn't know this is the company behind those annoying ads. On some sites, fivethirtyeight, its a infinite scroll list too. The worst thing I ever encountered. May be they fixed it now but it forced me to actually sign up for a fake email account and send an email to their staff about it.
Its amazing that they are worth 2.4B dollars though. I get it that its used on almost every site but still seems a lot. Our estimates of value have been severely distorted by the last year. Not sure if things will ever go down or if its the new normal.
I don't think there will be one, since they're doing a SPAC merger. They're not doing an IPO, but rather merging with an empty holding company that's already done one.
It is remarkable to me that a company that produces so little value to the consumer is worth SO much. There is a LOT of cash to be made in the dark-pattern cracks of society.
Possibly because digital policy doesn't seem to move quickly in the US. Taboola only exists because we don't have effective consumer policy and that's because we have a dysfunctional political system.
Taboola and Outbrain are both purveyors of absolute garbage clickbait ads of the lowest quality.
The founders of those two companies are the modern day version of snake oil salesmen, and they know it. They probably don't care, since they're clearly motivated purely by greed, not by any sense of pride in what they're building.
I don't normally have opinions this strong about a company, but man do they take pride in insulting the intelligence of every user who sees their ads.
This was interesting, but didn't go deep enough - where do all these ads ultimately lead to $$ transactions? Do they only end up selling legit products that are advertised non-manipulatively, like the hearing aids?
It seems to me that services like Taboola are something like manipulation-laundering services, providing enough room between deception and a product sold to circumvent the FTC's truth in advertising rules.
Could someone with more knowledge comment - is that at all right? Is there more to it? Could rule tweaks at the FTC have an impact on this?
People complain about Google but Taboola is a hundred times more toxic with their garbage ads cluttering up the bottom half of so many media sites' pages. Being shown the same ad for shoes a hundred times the day after I bought them is nothing next to shock-image ads into content farms.
Taboola's content is trash, but people should consider why it is so: Google&FB have destroyed the ad industry so much that only this kind of predatory behavior can survive.
"When the founders look back at their life and see "litter the internet with garbage" as their biggest accomplishment, I wonder if the money will be worth it."
I don't see taboola chumboxes with ublock on the "block all" setting, with FF, and gradually allow JS elements if needed. I used to like doing this with NoScript.
Sometimes I have to change browser for banking or specific shopping, and I have separate (non uBlock) browsers that i use strictly for work.
Reading the high level dislike of taboola, I wonder what is preventing people from using uBlock to zap Taboola?
> the company has invested in hiring over 50 full-time human moderation
I just can't help but laugh at this. Over 50 people, so likely under 60. For a company serving 500 million daily active users and 1 trillion aids/month...
Just comedy gold.
And these people are on minimum wage, and we don't even know in what country. Churn rate ~90%/month. But that's just a side joke.
This is what people value, middlemen trading trash for cash.
I hate these ads as much as anyone else, but realistically these are one of the main competitors we're relying on to keep the web open and away from Google and Facebook right?
While competition is good, do we really want this kind of competition?
Google ads became popular precisely because they were light and non invasive. These quite aggressively take a chunk of the screen real estate, and sometimes are very disruptive, e.g. when they put them between articles and comments.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
This word is used in the article and while I’m quite familiar with the thing, I didn’t know it had a name. Very fitting for the low-quality content that it contains!