Forbes June 17, 2020 Countless articles have been written about the harms caused by digital ad fraud. And countless more will be written. No one can claim to not know about it. No one can claim it’s not a problem. And no one can claim they don’t know what to do about it. Yet, ad fraud persists. There must be a reason. Perhaps there are many reasons — ad fraud fulfills key needs for practically every party in the digital advertising ecosystem. So instead of fighting ad fraud, these parties protect it, as vigorously as they would protect their own lives or livelihoods. Publishers

WWD May 28, 2020 Advertising is drying up for newsrooms of all sizes amid the coronavirus pandemic, but local newsrooms are especially hard hit, so Google is earmarking some funding aimed at stemming the flow of closures and layoffs at small media operations. The search giant — which makes most of its own revenue on advertising and is frequently pointed to, rightly or not, as the cause of many a media outlet’s financial problems — has selected about 5,000 smaller newsrooms to benefit from its new Journalism Emergency Relief Fund. Part of the Google News Initiative started two years ago, JERF was essentially a quick pivot of that team