• The New York Times, Thursday, April 6, 2017 7:30 AM

"Digital ads are easy to hate," writes Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times. Most everyone can agree on that. And now, with more advertisers finding that YouTube's search engine was placing their ads placed on sites with offensive content, there's a renewed focus on the poor quality of the online ad supply and the programmatic media buying practices that are contributing to the problem. Manjoo recommends pausing a beat before condemning programmatic ads. "On the one hand, there are some clear problems with how programmatic ads are placed. The industry is rife with complexity. This type of advertising is also quite new, so a lot of the machinery that runs the ad market is still in the works. But these problems are also fixable and should not obscure a larger truth: Even though they are far from perfect, in many ways programmatic ads are creating a more efficient advertising market. And given that advertising pays for nearly the entirety of what we see and do online, the upside of all the hand-wringing is that we are now examining how all that money gets spent, a process that should lead to better ads, and better media, too," he writes.

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