• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 13, 2025

Subject Line: Adalytics Study -- “That release on Friday night sort of fell like a dud,” a savvy PR pro mused in an email to me this week, adding, “I think they must've expected some bounce from the Super Bowl ad conversations.”I'm not sure about the second part, but the "dud" was due to a pretty simple rule of thumb: Don’t release anything adjacent to Super Bowl news leading into Super Sunday.

Even if it’s as salacious as an expose about Big Tech platforms enabling ads from some of the world's most reputable brands (see above and continued at bottom) on sites related to kiddie porn.

In any case, I must've been one of the duds, because my own awareness of the news came from reading Wendy Davis’ coverage about lawmakers’ “grave concern” reaction to it.

You probably already know how cynical I can be, but the only thing that surprised me about this news was that it required an analytics firm’s expose to make people aware things like that are going on, especially on digital media.

We are well into the era of invalid traffic, "MFA" and brand safe content "filtration," but the truth is the ad industry only observes, detects and filters the parts of the media universe it points to. Industry pros have to know something exists before they even know to avoid -- or "defund" -- it.

It's hard to imagine any of the brands exposed in Adalytics' report had any clue how their ads showed up on sites related to porn in general -- and adjacent to child porn specifically -- but the reality is no brand, agency, planner or buyer actually has any clue where their brand messages may show up in the wild.

And that's because for all the ad technological savvy the ad industry professes, it only ever looks at a tiny -- occasionally well-lit -- part of it. The vast majority is dark. And as this week's news illustrates, sometimes very, very dark.

The first time I thought about the concept of "dark media" was when I met the founder of now-defunct digital content tracking platform Tynt 14 years ago.

"What's the biggest social media network in the world," he asked me.

"Um, Facebook," I answered.

"Wrong, it's peer-to-peer," he corrected me.

By peer-to-peer, he meant that according to Tynt's content tracking -- and sharing -- tech, most digital media users did not post content to social media as much as they shared it directly with others via email, SMS, and a variety of peer-to-peer messaging apps.

At the time, Tynt benchmarked such "dark social" sharing as 70% of all social content, while the "light social" platforms -- Facebook, etc. -- were about 30%.

I was reminded about the concept of "dark social" again recently when I took a platform brief by Marfeel North America sales chief Michael Henry.

He was walking me through a presentation showing me where various publishers were getting their traffic from and one line item jumped out at me. It was "dark social."

While the sources of traffic varies by publisher in Marfeel's system, search and social generally are the dominant mediums, and within the social medium, "dark social" can be a very meaningful contributor.

Needless to say, I didn't get very far under Marfeel's hood, including its methodology, taxonomy and explicitly how it detects and categorizes "dark social" as a source, but that's not even the point of this column.

The point is that the ad industry only observes and detects the parts of the media universe it even knows exists. And/or considers relevant.

For nearly half a century, I've been curious about the amount of porn media consumption. I've had the hunch it was pretty prevalent, just not something conventional media measurement entities spent any time looking at. For a lot of reasons.

Over the years, I'd pick up anecdotal evidence, little snippets of insight, and adjacent studies and observations about consumer use of porn, in both analog and digital forms.

We even dedicated an issue of our own analog medium -- MEDIA magazine -- to the subject in the summer of 2005. The truth is, we didn't find much about it. What little we could pull together statically is contained in this column, published 20 years ago.

Our point wasn't a commentary on pornography, per se, but about how little the advertising and media industry actually knew about a form of media consumption we all knew to be somewhat prevalent.

Now apply that same question to a wide range of other unconventional, and likely non-ad-supported media consumption, including even darker forms of media consumption like child porn -- or whatever else you can imagine. Who knows what the magnitude actually is?

Most of what we know is anecdotal, like news stories about police raids, or scuttlebutt on social media forums.

All this makes me think about another fascinating facet of Tynt's research, which may be even more interesting than the magnitude of dark social. And that's not about its size, but the kind of content people share peer-to-peer vs. in light social.

According to Tynt, it is very personal, sometimes confidential and/or valuable content -- things like stock tips, etc. -- that people share peer-to-peer. vs. light social, which tends to be more socially-affirming content, or at least, what we'd like people to think we are spending our time with.

So kudos to Adalytics for at least thinking of poking around the darkest parts of the media universe, even if they didn't know how, when, and with which publication to break the news with.

At least they're pointing in new directions.

But what the media industry could use, is a really good scientific study measuring the size and weight of the media universe, and how much and what types of it are dark to most of us.