Myth: "recommended content" units are a soft, brand-safe place to be.

Myth: "recommended content" units are a soft, brand-safe place to be.
Wrong. A SaaS brand ran sponsored placements in those "You may also like" strips under articles. Click cost looked fine. Then they pulled the placement-level report the network buries.

72% of clicks came from a long tail of made-for-advertising sites — recipe-slideshow farms, slideshow-paginated junk — not the named publishers in the pitch deck. The brand-name inventory was 6% of delivery.

They blocklisted the tail. Reach dropped 70%. Cost-per-trial dropped 44%, and trial-to-paid doubled.

The "recommendation" frame is camouflage. You bought a publisher; you were served a content farm. Have you ever actually read your own placement report, line by line — or do you trust the summary tile?