No Fluff Weekly
One insight a week, taken from this site’s own corpus and the instruments pointed at it — what people searched for, what the answer box could not answer, which position moved. Not a roundup of other people’s news.
It publishes on LinkedIn — subscribe to the newsletter there. The writing it draws on lives here, in the essays and the dated position timelines.
What it is
- Where
- LinkedIn. It is a LinkedIn newsletter, not an email course.
- Cadence
- Weekly. A draft is generated Thursday; Evgeny publishes it, or does not.
- Shape
- One insight per edition, argued. Never a listicle, never a week-in-adtech roundup.
- Source
- This site’s own corpus and instrumentation — the weekly search-and-traffic pulse, the answer box’s log of questions it could not ground, the position ledger.
- Receipts
- Every claim traces back to the corpus or the snapshot, with two to four essays linked in each edition.
How an edition gets written
The pipeline is public because it is the subject. Every Wednesday an analytics job pulls the week’s search and traffic movement into a snapshot. A drafting agent reads that snapshot alongside the newest essays and the position ledger, picks the single strongest signal in it, and writes one edition. Evgeny reviews it and publishes it by hand. Nothing in that chain publishes on its own, and a draft that does not clear the bar does not run.
Archive
- Privacy-Safe Was the Wrong Word
A retraction of the 2025 claim that embeddings are privacy-safe: abstraction is not anonymity, embeddings are not anonymous by default and the controller carries the burden of proving otherwise, deletion is tractable in the vector store and unsolved in the model beside it, and the Agentic Audiences schema leaves consent out of its required fields.
- A Billboard Doesn't Click
A DOOH number is one near-observed event, one auditable claim and three models stacked on top — play, venue, crowd, audience, outcome — and running the Instrumentation Test backwards lands the punchline: DOOH is the one channel where reach and frequency still keep their referent, because a crowd on a concourse was never loggable and everyone always knew it.
- Who Counted It?
AdCP 3.2's first release candidate adds a vendor_relationship enum — first_party, affiliated, third_party — that forces a seller to declare its relationship to whoever is measuring it, with silence read as undeclared rather than independent.
- Contextual Won the Argument and Lost the Language
Contextual won its argument and kept selling the win as a targeting method — the smaller thing it turned into. The larger one: it is now the decisioning layer the supply side runs on, curated deal IDs carry 73% of bidding opportunities, and the next cycle goes to packaging that can answer for itself when an agent interrogates it.
Or read the writing by email.
This is the site's email list for new writing. No Fluff Weekly itself publishes on LinkedIn — subscribe there for the weekly edition.