InstaGrand Wizards?
Looks like X isn’t the only social media platform with a Hitler problem.
Instagram is also becoming a home for AI- and user-generated content that features hate speech, antisemitic rhetoric and Holocaust denialism, reports Fortune.
Much of this content receives millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes and frequently appears against ads from major brands like JPMorgan Chase and Nationwide.
Worst of all, content creators have been able to monetize this type of hateful content without much effort. One anonymous clip farmer says he’s been able to earn between $800 and $900 a month and gets his most consistent payouts from racist and Hitler-themed memes.
Meta responded to Fortune’s reporting by scrubbing the specific clips mentioned in the story. But that doesn’t do much to address the platform’s structural problems with moderation, which seem to stem from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision in January to end third-party fact-checking in the US and lift restrictions on certain topics “that are part of mainstream discourse.”
Meanwhile, the big brands that appear alongside this content have a decision to make. Is it worth investing money in a platform with so many brand safety problems – particularly if it starts to hemorrhage casual users the same way X has?
Crawl Control
Criteo-owned BidSwitch is taking the “pay per crawl” idea originated by Cloudflare and plugging it into programmatic pipes.
The Dynamic Content Ledger, as it’s being called, is a system to log, price and route AI crawl requests like ad impressions so publishers can charge for access and platforms can pay at scale.
Whereas Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl feature sits at the network edge – meaning it blocks AI bots by default, forcing them to either pay or go away – BidSwitch assumes that crawlers are ready to transact and routes them through a typical OpenRTB auction.
Here’s how it works: An SSP issues a bid request with a minimum crawl price and an associated crawl “identifier.” The AI platform (think of it as playing the DSP role) would then respond with its bid, and, if accepted, its crawler gets access to the page.
In a pilot with Raptive and SmartMedia, BidSwitch accepted just over half of submitted crawler “bid requests,” turning that traffic into real revenue.
So, wait, does this mean we actually can have nice things?
Paul Bannister, Raptive’s chief strategy officer, seems to think so. “This test was an excellent proof of concept to show that the technology required to implement a pay-per-crawl model can work in practice today,” he says in a blog post. “It’s an exciting precedent.”
Sloppy Work
Users are sick of AI slop. Marketers don’t care.
According to a recent BeReal survey, 47% of Gen Z doesn’t like AI content. On the other hand, influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy has determined that users respond well to AI when it generates creative and unique content, rather than, well, slop.
The interesting thing here is that, sometimes, people don’t know that the content they’re seeing is AI-generated – and if they did, that might change their perception.
Most marketers don’t care what tools they’re using, as long as users respond positively to the end results: “AI or otherwise, the key is to make content that audiences gravitate to,” Haley Schluter, head of North America for Buttermilk influencer agency, tells Digiday.
Never mind the fact that audiences have gotten so fed up with AI content that Pinterest actually created new controls last month that allow users to limit the amount of it they see in their feeds. And this week, TikTok followed suit by launching a test of its own AI content filters.
Still, AI disillusionment among consumers could be good news for marketers who focus on human-generated content. Some people still just want human contact.
But Wait! There’s More!
How Hearst’s partnership with publisher tech platform Aditude has been paying off. [AdMonsters]
Something else that’s been paying off: The Atlantic’s bot-blocking system. [Digiday]
YouTube is trying to make DMs happen again. [TechCrunch]
Walmart’s ad business skyrocketed in Q3, growing by over 50%. [Adweek]
A Trump administration official reportedly talked to Larry Ellison – Paramount’s largest investor – about the possibility of replacing specific CNN anchors that the president disfavors if Paramount Skydance succeeds in buying CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery. [The Guardian]
Gaming apps are rife with fraudulent ad impressions. [blog]
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