Drip

Let’s Write An Obit For Ad-Based Death Sites; Amazon Go Go Go, Ramping Up Store-Based Ad Tech Chops

AdExchanger’s Thursday round-up bundles two notable industry threads. First, the piece highlights a grim trend of obituary‑based ad sites that scrape death notices from funeral sites and social feeds to fuel landing pages with ads, sometimes including donation links that resemble family wishes. The sites rely on legitimate search traffic and often bypass brand-safety filters. Second, the column details Amazon’s Store Analytics, which uses AI, cameras, and sensors in Amazon Fresh and other stores to measure how often items are picked up and ultimately purchased, enabling brands to attribute in-store activity to online channels while preserving anonymization. Additional items cover Mozilla’s Firefox update giving users a control to strip URL tracking parameters, plus a roster of related tech and marketing updates. The round-up also references attribution implications for platforms like Facebook, Marketo, HubSpot, and DuckDuckGo, and notes leadership moves across the industry.

Website Breakdown: When Ad Blocking Goes Wrong

James Avery, CEO of Adzerk, analyzes how ad blockers operate and the unintended consequences for publishers and users. Blockers use browser hooks to intercept resource requests and rely on update-heavy lists to decide what to block, but these lists are not perfect and can block non-ad content. Examples include Ghostery blocking stylesheets and even jQuery, and an aggressive EasyPrivacy rule that blocks any .com image request named i.gif. The piece notes real-world impacts such as Walmart.com not working with many iOS content blockers, and analytics tools like Loggly, CrazyEgg, and Mixpanel being blocked, hindering product and engineering insights. The author suggests collaborative approaches with browsers (Mozilla’s content-blocking efforts) and encourages nonintrusive or native ads, or publishers building their own blockers to minimize site disruption.