問題詳情

   Web banners, pop-ups, news feeds, and search results, digital advertising swarms into consumers’ online content, in forms tolerably irksome to maddening irritating. Its ubiquitous-ness has led The Economist to describe digital advertisers as “border[ing] on the divine.”Not only are they “omnipresent, nestling their ads in news sites, search results and Instagram feeds,” but, thanks to cookies, which track consumers’ online activities, “they are increasingly omniscient.” Advertisers collect data, identify individual consumers’ interests, and decide what ads to serve consumers next time for more successful marketing. This aggregation of data is called behavioral targeting.   As the Internet advertising revenues continue to hike, at the turn of the 21st century, major search engines, like Google, have shifted away from the traditional advertising model of “one-size-fits-all” to custom-made tailoring. Personized ads are delivered to screens based on tracked web browsing behavior. As one professional in the field puts it, advertisers “no longer . . . know just general things about you, but they target you, specifically.” The extent to which technology pervades our daily life broods a creepy prospect.   “Omnipotence, however, is proving harder to achieve,” notes the Economist. As advent of the ad server has brought lucrative swings into the industry’s practicing models, so have thorny challenges arisen as a result. Magna Global, a media agent, forecasts that global advertising spending online may surpass that on television in 2017. It tantalizes a pie everyone wants a share of. Luma Partners,an investment bank, estimates that the supply of digital ads involves more than 2,500 companies, and the chain is as tangled up as a twisted knot. Participants playing to the woe include advertisers, those who want to sell their products, publishers, those who publish ads, and between them, the multi-layered “middlemen.”   Between the linear pipeline of advertisers to consumers, there are now thousands of firms scrimmaging to analyze consumer data,sell and monitor ads. They trade ad slots, that is, space on a webpage that a consumer has just clicked on, based on cookies and other tags that are tracking his online activities. It is aimed to help publishers secure the best price for their slots and advertisers the best reward for their money spent. These ad slots, known as “inventory” in the business, are then repackaged and sold to other middlemen.“An ad . . . can change hands 15 times before finally being bought by an advertiser,” says Peter Stabler, an analyst at Wells Fargo, a bank.   Aggravating the headaches of media and ad-tech firms is fraud. Perching on the advertising supply chain is a legion of cyber zombies, robots posing on the other side as human consumers, to “see” adds and to sink its teeth into the lucrative pie. Luckily, to the rescue of the advertisers are the likes of AppNexus, which filters out fraudulent ad “readers” and cuts in the share sold by middlemen.Losses, however, are inevitable on the advertisers’ part. This year, the Association of National Advertisers, estimates that more than $7 billion will be paid to fake ads by its members in the US.   An even greater woe is what the Economist terms “ad nauseam,” the ever-rising number of consumers blocking ads altogether.That consumers today are fed up with online ads is one factor. That third-party cookies and tracking tags are notorious disguises worn by malware is another. Additionally, ads also suck batteries and consumers’ cellular data plans. It is no surprise, then, that AdBlock Plus,[!--empirenews.page--]a popular tool, has been downloaded more than 500 million times.   Not to be mistaken is that the company does let through a list of ads. To be on the list, however, sites with lots of ads, like Google,have to pay a fee. AdBlock Plus deems it proper, but Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB, which represents media and ad-tech firms,calls it extortion. On the whole, ad-blocking impacts ad publishers the hardest as they rely on advertising revenue. Wells Fargo estimates that it will cost publishers in the US some $4.6 billion and $12.5 billion globally this year. Advertisers at the same time are also agitated,as they cannot access real consumers online.   Altogether, these challenges may prompt a shift in the industry’s structure, moving power to the select few, larger companies.Concerns about fraud bring advertising brands to favor large platforms such as Google and Facebook, who track consumers from computers to phones, through logins, and back again. Other companies such as Yahoo, Oracle, and Salesforce have purchased smaller firms in an effort to offer themselves as one-stop shops to advertisers. As players continue grapple to claim a bigger share of the lucrative pie, it is not unreasonable to see a shake-out in this now over crowded industry in the future.
41. What is the main idea of the passage?
(A) Digital advertising surpasses television as dominant medium of advertising.
(B) Digital advertising faces challenges and is likely to undergo structural changes.
(C) Digital advertising is yet another industry that sees the dominance of big companies.
(D) Digital advertising faces undermined incomes as more fraudulent ghost readers loom.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：困難0.333333
統計：A(3),B(6),C(5),D(3),E(0)

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