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Ask HN: Why don't publishers serve ads from their domains to thwart ad-blockers?
- georgeott 11y agoWho counts the impressions, to pay the ad client?
- knd775 11y agoOP probably means major publishers who can solicit advertisers more directly.
- johnward 11y agoWhich tend to still use 3rd party ad severs. Probably because they don't want to develop that tech in house.
- vortico 11y agoGood point, I had this question earlier about ads in general, but this didn't even pass my mind.
- dredmorbius 11y agoThere are other bases for compensation. Conversions / actions / clickthroughs. Measure what you can see. Don't obsess over what you cannot.
- untothebreach 11y agoIdea: ad network w/ a daemon the publisher installs in their infrastructure between the users and the content. Maintains a blockchain which verifies exactly how many impressions there have been.
- wvenable 11y agoWe do that but Ad-blockers block even those ads. We have our own text-based adds like Google Adsense text ads which are just <div> tags and those get filtered out as well.
- totalrobe 11y agoReally? How does content in <div> tags not get filtered out as well, or does it?
- ivank 11y agoThe filter list will block the div by id, class, or by its position among some other containing element.
- knd775 11y agoBut how does it know that it is an ad? Some advanced heuristics?
- jordigh 11y agoFilter lists are curated by humans. It's an arms race between two smart groups.
- ivank 11y agoIt's all manual. Someone sees it and submits the item into the EasyList blocklist: https://easylist.adblockplus.org/ https://easylist.adblockplus.org/ - it looks like http://forums.lanik.us/ http://forums.lanik.us/ is used for reporting items to block or unblock.
- zeeshanm 11y agoProbably adblockers keep a dictionary of filters for blocking native ads.
- jordigh 11y agoI work hard to block all ads, including those. It's super helpful if you can provide an HTML class to your divs so I can more easily block them, but I will keep on working on blocking all ads by all means possible. I'm thinking of building an ad extension that doesn't show the ads but reports to js that the ad is still there, so that websites think that ad is there. It might also help for some cases to download the ad contents but not display them. I do not think this is any more immoral than you trying to make my computer display things I do not want. If you want my money, just ask for it. Don't tell me via ads to give my money to somone else. Google Contributor is a promising experiment. Bitcoin micropayments are also convenient.
- lolatu54 11y agoAds have many specialized requirements that you wouldn't really want to build yourself. Tracking, tokenization of url parameters, rotating ads to meet impression goals, and typically advertisers have build their ads to be served by major ad networks, so you would have to replicate their systems to support those ad units. Ads are way more complicated than most people realize.
- georgeott 11y agoI've heard some Ad networks are asking clients to setup reverse-proxys, so they can make the image APPEAR to come from same origin. It's getting crazy!
- tomtang0514 11y agoAs an engineer in a Ads company, I totally agree. It's not just grab ad content from your customer, write some api integration with various publisher and send them the ad. The complexity involved in serving an ad properly and efficiently is way beyond the understanding of outsiders. Rotation, different kind of measurable metrics (we have at least 3x metrics than you can see from google analytics), ad serving efficiency (believe or not, we are able to serve ads faster than some publishers serve their own content), tons of targeting configurations and more. Tracking makes all those things possible.
- blakeyrat 11y agoIt's possible the industry could build some sort of "cross advertiser network API" that would allow proper accounting/selection of ads while remaining on one company's domain (from the perspective of that user's web browser). It would require the cooperation of a lot of parties, many of which (optimizing firms for example) have a vested interest in the way things work now.
- eevilspock 11y agoI believe a website is responsible for everything that is delivered and all tracking that happens when they publish a page and deliver it. They don't get to segregate their content from ad content and wash their hands of responsibility for any lies or misuse of data by the later. So forcing domains to host the ads they insert and all the tracking that goes with makes that more explicit and thus a good thing.
- harshreality 11y agoAd blockers don't just block domains. They also block (full) url patterns, which are easily adapted to sites (and there are many) which host ads for themselves.
- 0x0 11y agoI guess one of the "benefits" of serving ads from a third party site is that you can cookie the user on the thirdparty domain, and build a profile as the user moves between participant sites. ("Re-targeting"). Serving ads from a first party domain likely loses this information since there won't be a shared cookie? Also it might complicate installation (you'd need to install some server side software that fetches ad content from the ad network, and probably some custom development to integrate it without being caught by a one-line rule in adblock?) Also! With more and more ads running javascript based animations, you really don't want shady ad-network-provided JS running in the context of your main site. (XSS)
- chinathrow 11y agoCan't you set a cookie then re-direct to the PNG/JPG back on your own server? Aynway, I've seen some domains shifting some crucial images like a play button into ad containers/folders just to come around ad blocker. Easy to adjust within ad blockers though.
- 0x0 11y agoNot sure what you mean; if you mean to point an <img src> at a third party domain that responds with a 301 redirect together with a Set-Cookie then that won't really work because 1. you are pointing to a third party domain which the OP already suggested is blocked so the client never loads it and 2. you would need a complicated image hosting system on the first party domain for no good reason and 3. the first party domain image host won't see the cookie and can't pick an ad that matches the user's profile ("retargeting"). Did you mean something else?
- nickporter 11y agoIf I made an ad system that needed to track a user, I would want to use my own domain because then I can save the user's state between websites using my own domain's local storage.
- dmritard96 11y agoCounting Impressions. A different model is needed if the publishers servers have to get the ad first and then give it to the client because the ad server then needs to trust the publisher to report impressions honestly and the publisher has an incentive to inflate that number.
- infogulch 11y agoA: Drops 'impressions' as the metric for allocating money for ads. Use something else like clicks which take you to the advertiser's site.
- calbear81 11y agoYou're assuming the point of all display ads is to make you click. Many advertisers don't care whether you click or not, they just want to make sure you saw the ad/message. Many brands don't require online engagement, they want to reinforce what their brands means.
- justizin 11y agoWelcome to the 90s, when advertising on the web was not profitable. ;) I totally agree with what is wrong with advertising on the web, which is basically everything, but there is also value to impressions. Let's say a new movie is coming out. I don't care if you go to the movie website, I just want to get the actors' faces in front of you with a movie name. Same goes for a political candidate. I don't need you to go to Bernie Sanders' website, I just need you to know that he's running and a couple of things that he stands for. The problem is that advertising and tracking are inherently connected today. Want to target ads to people who are likely to respond to them? You need profiles on all those users. Want privacy? You need to starve the collection of your data to build profiles. IMO this is precisely why Google still gives me better results than DuckDuckGo - not _only_ do they sometimes know who I am and things about me, but their data set is based on knowing so much about all of us. I also find that supremely unsettling. Having worked on ad-driven properties, I'll say it's pretty common to track things at both ends. The advertiser always wants the impressions / click-throughs / whatever to be as low as possible, and the operators of the site want it to be higher. Much negotiation ensues. Also, most folks don't have direct ad sales, though this is the holy grail in ad-driven properties, most sites use doubleclick and a suite of others, and often an intermediary inventory management service which picks the ads which pay the most for a given hour or day and maybe switch out providers based on their speed (doubleclick also gets really slow at busy times and will cause your site not to load :/)
- austenallred 11y agoGenerally ads pay up to an order of magnitude more if there is some level of tracking and targeting available, and that's what most ad blockers target. Paying a bunch of money to show ads to who-knows-who who-knows-how-many-times isn't very valuable. Paying money to show ads to owners of Shitzus that make over $100,000/year is worth $12/click. I'm pretty certain that as ad blockers grow there will be a lot more work-around (doing the work on the backend and serving up static HTML or a lot more native ads), but ad blockers aren't quite to the level that it's worth it to make those changes.
- mgalka 11y agoIs there that much of a difference? Publishers should have a pretty good breakdown of their visitors demographic distribution.
- austenallred 11y agoIt depends on the publication. If you're ESPN you have a pretty good idea (which, by the way, makes the publication as a whole more valuable) If you're Yahoo, however, it's pretty much a toss up.
- elorant 11y agoBecause advertisers don't trust publishers. They need a third party agency with no immediate interest in the game that could guarantee reliable reporting. For example if the ads are served from the publisher then the advertising network has no way of identifying fake clicks/impressions made by botnets.
- mbesto 11y ago|| || Sales || Tech || ||
- chkuendig 11y ago1.) cross-domain tracking 2.) ease of integration 3.) independent analytics
- r1ch 11y agoTried this once. Ad block maintainers went out of their way to create custom filters for our site.
- chinathrow 11y agoI think the only thing you can do these days is to rotate ad directories _and_ file names constantly, i.e. multiple times each hour just to run around ad blockers and their maintainers. Or did you go already that far?
- donavanm 11y agoAre you starting from a false assumption? Delegation seems like the logical answer. Content publishers already delegate out a DNS label/domain for CDNs. Why wouldn't they also delegate a DNS label/domain to a third party for ad infrastructure?
- ConSeannery 11y agoHere's how a typical banner/adspace currently works: 1. The ad/banner space downloads a javascript file 2. Javascript runs, collects browser+cookie+other identifying information and sends it on up to an ad exchange 3. The ad-exchange systems cross-reference the information it receives with other information it already has (think huge low latency k/v store) in order to try to identify you further, perform cross-device identification, save more information 4. The ad-exchange system then rolls all this information together and fans out this package saying "here is a male aged 25-35 who likes ponies and bick shaving cream" to dozens or hundreds of partnered ad providers 5. Each ad provider looks at their content, finds a close match, and then bids on how much they would pay in order to serve content to this person 6. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder (no idea why it's the second highest) 7. Ad-exchange then sends this second highest bidder's ad URL back to the waiting javascript running in the users browser, and ad-exchange marks the winning bid so it knows who won/who has to pay at the end of the month. 8. From 1 to here usually has an SLA of occurring in less than 170ms 9. User's browser then loads up the response URL and the ad displays Asking website operators to host their own thing is feasible, but perhaps not worthwhile. The big money maker in adspace is targeted advertising, and small sites will never have the infrastructure to be able to really identify anybody but perhaps their core users. Others have mentioned reverse proxies to make content appear as if it came from the target site, and that may exist, but the reality is whatever these guys do is currently being defeated pretty handily by community driven ad blocking. Perhaps we will eventually see what you're talking about though
- ahp 11y ago> 6. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder (no idea why it's the second highest) It's called a Vickrey Auction. It allows bidders to bid their true value (instead of trying to outbid all of the other bidders, as is what results from a first-price auction). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
- thomblake 11y ago>6. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder (no idea why it's the second highest) >7. Ad-exchange then sends this second highest bidder's ad URL back to the waiting javascript running in the users browser, and ad-exchange marks the winning bid so it knows who won/who has to pay at the end of the month. It's a second-price auction - the highest bidder is picked, but the second-highest price is paid (more or less). The URL thus is from the highest bidder, not the second highest bidder.
- chinathrow 11y agoFollowup question to some folks within the ad industry which I'm sure are reading: I serve Google AdSense on one of my sites with 10'000 - 20'000 ad impressions daily. What amount of $ would one expect to make with those impressions if changing ad networks away from Google? Any recommendations?
- seunosewa 11y agoIt doesnt work. If your site is popular enough, ad blockers would still target the ads on your website using site-specific rules.
- as1ndu 11y agoThe reason is one. And it is because ad blockers actually do not affect both the publishers and ad companies that much. About only less 5% of the internet users world wide have ever employed ad blockers (http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/in-bringing-ad-blocking-t/2128856.html http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/in-bringing-ad-...). I am sure they will move ad serving to the backend when they get better reasons to shun of client side technology. Its just not worth it....yet.
- zhobbs 11y agoThis is changing fast depending on the audience for your content. Some publishers are now seeing 40%+ of their traffic ad blocked. Some countries are seeing 30%+ of total population using ad block. Ad block usage is up 41% year over year...this is going to be a very serious issue very soon for many publishers. Some of my numbers are from: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-blocking-software-suggests-wide-use/?_r=0 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-blockin...
- as1ndu 11y agothanx for the enlightement!!!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Scoundreller 11y agoSlightly OT: If more publishers defaulted to SSL, they would thwart lots of corporate ad filtering that strips out Adsense and the like.