19 ms·

VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

1045 points by archon810 10y ago

captainmuon 10y ago
I'm a bit shocked about the state of advertising. When I was making websites (~early 2000s), there were a lot more options to choose from, it seems. Now you basically just have Google and this opaque network of algorithmic auctions. Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from. I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video (thank God), but you could have unobtrusive text links, you could have banners, little buttons, HTML blocks, and so on. And yes, also annoying pop-ups and flash ads... You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today, but I believe it was not nearly as bad as we think. It was certainly better than some alternatives (horrible pop-up-ads that installed dialers, does anybody remember them?) Back then, I was proud to not serve evil or annoying ads, and to promote articles from partners on my site - including setting links to them to promote their page ranks. (That Google shows links among search results that they get money for, but forbids slightly improving the position of search results when other people got money for it tells a lot IMHO.) One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites?
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today Is this the case? I've seen absolutely tonnes of blatantly paid-for content across the web, and if anything there seems to be much more than there ever was.
  - nvdk 10y ago
    they just call it "native advertising" now :)
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      Or sponsored, which is fine by me.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    I'm not sure vilified is the right word, but the FTC in the US and the ASA in the UK have both said that paid-for content needs to be marked as such. The ASA rules are pretty tight. The user has to know something is paid for content before clicking. So a YouTuber putting out a sponsored video needs to include something in the title of the video, and the link, saying "sponsored content". A banner at the start of the video isn't enough.
    - anexprogrammer 10y ago
      I wish a lot more people knew the ASA were a part of EASA[1] and that EASA even exist. ASA are happy to get involved with complaints about a wide range of countries[2] (basically all Europe, Canada, Brazil, Chile and the UK Commonwealth). eg, if you complain about an advert from a Canadian firm the ASA will refer it to the appropriate national agency for you. My limited understanding is this is reciprocal for residents of those nations too. The rules are being flouted wholesale, yet many nations have an ASA that could do something about it. [1] http://www.easa-alliance.org/ http://www.easa-alliance.org/ [2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-border-complaints.aspx https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-b...
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Be wary of terms such as “sponsorship” and “in association with” The ASA is generally likely to consider terms such as “sponsored content” as referring to a traditional sponsorship relationship, where material has been financially sponsored but over which the creator retains editorial control. Sponsorship of this kind is not covered by the CAP Code. Using such terms to describe an ad feature is unlikely to be acceptable. Following an ASA challenge, the ASA ruled against an ad that was included in a “sponsored section” of a website and labelled as “in association with”, considering that the labels in themselves did not make clear the commercial nature of the content
- pjc50 10y ago
  One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites? There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud the advertiser.
  - archon810 10y ago
    That's only 1 of many reasons. Another big one being it's a lot more time-consuming and costly to run your own ad sales team, you always have to worry about filling all ads in all countries, and the average CPMs you get may not be nearly as good as the ones without any headaches from big ad networks (well, headaches from the advertiser acquisition perspective).
  - a3n 10y ago
    How do physical newspapers prove ad serving to their buyers? I'm certain they don't point to every single newspaper thrown in a driveway.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Third parties and surveys e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Counc... Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.
      - a3n 10y ago
        And that, eventually, is going to have to be good enough for online publishers and advertisers.
      - kbart 10y ago
        So why can't the same be done on websites? If numbers of views can't be confirmed without spying on users or trusting shady actors to do that for you, it means the business model that is based on this metric is skewed.
- ddebernardy 10y ago
  > Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from. There was a lot of consolidation. But they're still around. They're basically that opaque network of algorithmic auctions you mentionned, in fact. If they can't display one of their direct clients' ads, they sell the spot to the highest bidder.
jacquesm 10y ago
At some point the cost of advertising to the medium in terms of user disengagement will exceed the income. I can't wait for it to happen, then at least we will reach some kind of steady-state. I really pity the newspapers, especially the ones that also have an online presence, they are caught between a rock and a hard place and no matter what they do they end up hurting themselves, their employers, users or shareholders. It's very hard to transition from a 1800's model to one that will work 200 years later. Bandwidth being as cheap as it is means that advertisers really don't care about how many bytes they need to shove down the pipe in order to make a sale. End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem, to them it is mission accomplished and the website owner/publisher will end up holding the bag.
- archon810 10y ago
  I find it pretty ironic that Google constantly tries to optimize for every byte in some of its products, pushes for speed and mobile optimization, yet ends up completely negating that in its advertising offerings. This and the malware that gets through. Stop allowing arbitrary Javascript in ads, and that's it - problem solved. But nope, the cat and mouse chase goes on, and maldvertisers are always a step ahead.
- kbart 10y ago
  "End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem" Well, it is their problem or else we wouldn't have this "crisis" of Internet ads now and cries of advertisers/publishers. After all, you can only push a limited amount of bullshit down the users throat before they start throwing up.. It took many years of abuse by countless browser bars, pop-up ads, auto play videos, inflated network bills for a casual user to start using ad-blockers.
- ojosilva 10y ago
  I wonder too if there are some good data on user disengagement. Lately there seems to be a spike of autoplay videos in the sites I visit frequently. I just immediately hit the Back button as my silent "protest", but I can't help feeling stupid, like I'm the only human being that doesn't seem to enjoy loud videos running in the background. Where do these media companies get their data from? Data that says autoplay videos create more engagement or revenue or something that can make up for people, like me, just running away? The other day Fortune magazine surprised me with that same thing, and the video wasn't even related to what the article was about. Does it come from Facebook's success with _silent_ autoplay? These are not rhetoric questions, I'm really curious to understand the logic behind this.
Dunofrey 10y ago
I still won't use ad blockers, I find them akin to stealing from content creators, but I'm getting close.
- krylon 10y ago
  After several incidents where malware was distributed through ads, I think it is fair to call it self defence.
  - rvense 10y ago
    "The fact that you can tell I'm using an ad-blocker makes me feel justified in using one."
  - blahi 10y ago
    This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale. The lion's share of malware distribution is done by hacked sites where the attacker configured to deliver a payload only in 5-10% of pageviews in order to delay detection.
    - kbart 10y ago
      This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale" Not only. My older relatives happily click on "Congratulations, you won a million!!!" ads and end up with yet another browser bar or worse. No JavaScript required.
      - blahi 10y ago
        Parent talks about distribution of malware...
- Touche 10y ago
  I don't know why you feel that way, do you feel bad about tearing an ad out of a magazine?
  - 10y ago
franciscop 10y ago
If someone needs to have an ad solution to have their website running it is NOT a business that should exist. It's like we say restaurant owners should support the mafia because otherwise they cannot make money in the neighborhood. Or any other criminal(ish) activity. "Without advertising we wouldn't be able to run this" MAYBE it really means you shouldn't run it at all, but don't force advertising(+malware) down your users throat just to justify an unsound business decision. Edit: reworded to avoid confussion
- lazyjones 10y ago
  > If someone needs to have an obscure ad solution to have their website running it is NOT a business that should exist. It's not a simple black/white choice in most cases. As a top 10K website publisher, you have many advertising options. Some are considered safe and user-friendly (Google, DoubleClick - IMHO no longer justified) and others less so (pop-ups, various auctioned stuff). You then get to decide on these options by estimating the potential revenue vs. negative effect on users for each. Some sites are greedier than others, some marketing folks more convincing than UX managers, many people just don't know what to expect until they get their first sh*tstorm from users. OTOH there are thousands of worthless sites that obviously only exist to serve ads, some major publishers included.
  - archon810 10y ago
    Pertaining to the same quote, obscure isn't part of the equation here. Almost all ad networks are guilty, including the biggest (i.e. the least obscure by definition) ones, like AdSense/AdX.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    Sorry I probably explained it wrong (not native English speaker). The important part of the quote is not "obscure", you could remove it and keep my original meaning. What I mean is that if it's not a sustainable business then you'd need to add advertising to make it so. So maybe it shouldn't be called a business at all. But don't force advertising on your users just because you made an unsound business decision.
- 10y ago
JoshTriplett 10y ago
> A single VPAID ad absolutely demolishes site performance on mobile and desktop, and we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers. The site is responsible for including ads; "publishers" should get the full blame from their readers. The publishers themselves can complain to the ad network they use, but readers are right to just blame the publishers.
- mpclark 10y ago
  It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with. The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense, the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of networks were infiltrating through that little window. The only reasonable action was to just turn it all off and forgo the marginal ad revenue. We now only host ads we have sold direct.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    >It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with. Then the publisher should stop working with networks that do this. That's not in our control as users, only the publisher can do that.
    - archon810 10y ago
      The problem is pretty much all networks do this.
      - nailer 10y ago
        Maybe there's a market there? An ad network content providers can trust. Even well known news websites have ios app store redirects that stop content from being viewed.
snarfy 10y ago
Sites need to be legally liable for installing malware on your computer. That will solve all of this. I can go to prison for clicking on the wrong link but somehow they get away with drive-by ransomware installs.
- chopin 10y ago
  They are not? At least I'd think it violates CFAA. I don't know the CFAA in detail, does it have an exemption for site hosters?
- archon810 10y ago
  This is laughable. If site owners could go to jail every time a 3rd-party code they're not fully responsible for does something bad, they'd all be in jail now. https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-analysis/2015/08/large-malvertising-campaign-takes-on-yahoo/ https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-analysis/2015/08/large-... http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-b... Etc.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    Then the only standing ones would be site owners who care enough to make sure they don't allow malware on their visitor from their site. What's the problem?
    - archon810 10y ago
      Because that's not how the world works. You'd jail 99.999% of publishers and the only ones not jailed would be ones who don't have any advertising.
      - J_Darnley 10y ago
        Sounds great to me. People only publishing what they want others to read, no clickbait, absolutely marvellous.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_Understated_ 10y ago
In most walks of life we happily pay for something that provides us value: Cars, phones, shoes etc. I don't see the web/app ecosystem as any different although owners (that's app creators and web site owners/creators) feel they can make more by selling our lives to a third party - That's not something I want to happen with my details I will block your system for doing so. If I feel your site/app is not providing me with value then I likely will uninstall/never come back. It's a choice thing. I have paid for apps in the past and will continue to do so in the future but only for stuff that brings me real value. I may not be the biggest supporter out there but I have a couple of Patreon's running (is that the right term?) for people that provide me with value. Let's face it, there is a whole load of shite content out there... so maybe we need to cull the herd a bit. Anyway, you can run a website for almost nothing these days and spending, say, $50 a month will get you some serious hosting solutions so if your business is just exploiting my browsing habits and selling my metadata on then I will happily grab the popcorn and watch your site burn.
- blahi 10y ago
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, google and facebook are almost charcoal now.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Curious, given how strongly you feel about the commercial use of personally identifiable information (pii) - how do you feel about the collection, use, sharing, etc. of pii by governments?
  - _Understated_ 10y ago
    I don't agree with Governments doing it en-mass (I have no problem with targetted surveillance based on reasonable suspicion) and I have signed various petitions to that effect over the years. The only real option, apart from revolution, is to move to another country that doesn't do it but I don't think there is one now. Of bigger concern is that I am in the minority: Most of my circle believe in the terrorist/paedo rhetoric the Government spins and think its justifiable. As for the commercial stuff, my only problem is if I can't avoid it or I really have to go out of my way to avoid it but so far my tinfoil hat hasn't been breached, e.g. my wife has various loyalty cards but I don't want to carry one... I have that choice with commercial entities I'm in the UK btw.
bernarpa 10y ago
I manage ads in several mobile apps and I've chosen to disable full screen video ads. Still Google's AdMob mail hints keep recommending to activate them as well in order to get more revenue. More revenue for me and more revenue for the ad provider, that's the only reason.
- archon810 10y ago
  I'm on a war path with these video ads, but advertising networks don't give us enough (or any) tools to disable serving them. Most of the time, it's either all or nothing. Some let you disable certain types of ads, including AdSense (it has a VPAID checkbox now that I think about it), but when I reached out to AdX people about it, they were not helpful so far (their recommendation was to turn off anything that says "video" in the OptIn tab, except that does not get rid of these VPAID ads). sovrn was a network I dropped for this very reason - they kept serving VPAID ads and didn't give me a way to turn them off. The list goes on.
bkmartin 10y ago
Yep... I have seen this increasing steadily for a while now. Most major "news" sites have this garbage being served. Then these same sites decide to autoload video at the top of the page and their site becomes completely unusable. Do they not realize how horrible the experience is for the user?
- omerhj 10y ago
  It took CNN years to get the aspect ratio of their videos right -- all of their web video used to look like standard def TV stretched out to a HD screen. So the answer is almost certainly no.
ungzd 10y ago
BTW, nowadays everyone talks about AI, machine learning and "mobile-first". But when I open any mobile app or any mobile website with ads I see only ads of "clash of kings" and similar scammy games. They collect lots of data but ads have no targeting at all. At least ads on mobile phones. I can't understand it.
- vintermann 10y ago
  The Nutrimatic drink machine model of customization.
- dandare 10y ago
  You are simply the scammy games industry's target group :D
- rm999 10y ago
  I used to work in the industry - mobile ads can be quite targeted. My guess is apps like clash of clans appeal to a wide range of people and are backed by heavy ad spending. This means a wide variety of people will be targeted with their ads. Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer probably isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers, or ads for retirement communities.
  - creshal 10y ago
    > Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer probably isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers, or ads for retirement communities. You'd be surprised. I bought a travel sewing kit five years ago on Amazon, and ever since I'm getting advertisements and "recommendations" for handbags, makeup and high-heeled shoes. It's so blatantly sexist and wrong it's almost funny again. Almost.
    - staticelf 10y ago
      Is it though? Just because you aren't interested in these other recommendations and connected ads doesn't mean the wide majority who purchases sewing kits aren't as well. If this "blantantly sexist" ads were wrong no one would purchase such ads. Sure they may be stereotypical, but that's what targeted ads are all about, creating data driven stereotypes that later can be used for increasing sales and relativity.
rubyfan 10y ago
This among many other reasons is why publishers lose the ad blocker debate with me.
adam-a 10y ago
I recently had a similar problem, browsing a reputable news site (newstatesman.com), I accidentally clicked an ad and got taken directly to a page containing explicit pornography. I complained to the site and they said they do what they can in terms of blacklisting ads, but they don't have enough time or staff. I can't believe there's no ad network that will take a stand against abusive advertising and actually vet the ads on their network. Surely they could get a lot of business and at least a lot of goodwill. Is it just too labour intensive?
- moron4hire 10y ago
  You would think some of the most profitable companies in the world could afford to hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go out.
  - anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
    If you mean the sites that display ads, that's not how they work - ad companies bid on ad spaces as the page is requested.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      They could still afford to Mechanical Turk the hell out of that.
  - poooogles 10y ago
    >hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go out. They do, all creatives are audited on submission. You can't provide literally ANY creative at bid time, it has to be one that's been audited. It's people that then switch the creative once the audit has been completed that are screwing everyone. It should result in you being banned from the network, but it's hard (apparently) to ban people that are paying the bills for you the ad network.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Why is it even possible to make changes after the audit?
chrismbarr 10y ago
One thing to note: When the developer tools are opened Chrome will temporarily disable the cache. When the video loops it would normally just reach into cache and re-play the file that was already downloaded. However, with devtools open it will probably re-download all the files again.
- archon810 10y ago
  That's not true at all. It only disables the cache if you tell it to. Like so: http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png. As you can see, that checkbox is not on in the demoed GIF. The ad code is actively requesting new ads and pinging its trackers countless times.
  - chrismbarr 10y ago
    ok, sure, it's configurable. But that box is checked by default.
    - archon810 10y ago
      1. Not for any installs of Chrome I've ever had. 2. That's entirely irrelevant in this matter because it was not turned on.
- anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
  Totally false.
- dhimes 10y ago
  Excellent point.
  - archon810 10y ago
    Except the part where it's not.
    - 10y ago
spiderfarmer 10y ago
Why isn't there an ad network that lets you inject ads server side? That would solve a lot of problems.
- archon810 10y ago
  Because any sort of page caching makes it much harder to count impressions, among other reasons.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    With HTML5 ads there are several ways around that I think?
    - archon810 10y ago
      HTML is a client-side language for browsers to interpret. I'm not sure what you mean exactly - can you please clarify?
      - spiderfarmer 10y ago
        HTML5 ads are like small webpages. So you can still use javascript to load tracking pixels from within the creative. https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017 https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017
- mrweasel 10y ago
  Because they want to be able to switch ads very quickly, and they don't want to rely on you to supply the number of ad-displays. It's not a problem getting the correct data from your server logs, but it's not difficult to imagine someone fiddling with the number and indicating that they displayed far more ads than they really did.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    Quickly changing the ad is a problem yes, but you can still track the views / clicks from with in the creative with HTML5 ads.
mtgx 10y ago
Is this really such a hard problem for Google to solve or is it just turning a blind eye to it? Can't Google limit the size of the ads somehow? The number of requests per page? Whether the ad remains a static image or it's a video? I find it hard to believe it would be that hard for Google to implement restrictions around this. And advertisers wonder why the use of adblockers is skyrocketing. If Google knows about this but isn't willing to fix it, then I worry it will allow similar stuff to work within AMP pages as well, but the difference will be you won't be able to block them unless you block the whole content as well. That would mean advertisers have learned nothing from the rise of adblockers.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Increasing Google's revenue every quarter is certainly enough of a challenge without a policy of discarding clients. Don't expect any solution from them. This is something end users (by ad-blocking) or startups (by destroying the market) can do, but not big companies.
jkot 10y ago
> I'm at 53MB downloaded and 5559 requests. That was not advertisement, but malware. It is probably running DDos attack on some website. We should block that. Anyway, at ancient days I surfed with i486 on 14.4 kbps modem. Not much has changed since.
- archon810 10y ago
  Did you look at the pings it was sending to its stats servers? It's not malware, some evil assholes actually created this VPAID concept with its players, trackers, and garbage performance.
  - jkot 10y ago
    If it quacks like a duck...
    - archon810 10y ago
      This logic doesn't make sense. If an advertiser willingly pings itself to a ridiculous degree does not mean it's a conspiracy to bring a server (its own?) down.
      - jkot 10y ago
        If something hijacks your computer and uses excesive resources, you should assume it has hostile intentions. It is not your job to inspect packet to find out what is going on.
        lmm 10y ago
        It is worth distinguishing between actual malice and mere incompetence, and handling them differently.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  >That was not advertisement, but malware. I doubt it. It more likely that someone wants to know how long the reader/users of a page are exposed to their ads. Some idiot savant then figured "Hey, we'll play a video and download the bits in chucks. Then we know how much of the videos was played, and that's the amount of time they spend on the page."
a3n 10y ago
From the comments: > Peter Dahlberg > we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers. That's because you are to blame. As far as I know nobdoy forces you to use those shitty ad networks. Look for a honest way to finance your business and don't whine. That actually makes a lot of sense. As long as Google et al. are making money from this, they have no incentive to change. Google, the automated rainbow monolith, in particular doesn't have any incentive to even listen. But if publishers take the apparently extremely inconvenient step of using other networks, this sort of shit might get cleaned up. EDIT: Perhaps I should have said "other buyers;" these problems seem closely associated with the nature of ad networks. The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?
- kbart 10y ago
  "The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?" Simple. Write that in big, bold letters at the top of your site. You know, the same place where that autoplay video ad usually goes.
  - makomk 10y ago
    A site I sometimes frequent has a big, bold banner at the top asking people to disable adblock and claiming it doesn't use audio ads and other annoying ads. It's also the site whose video ads that autoplayed with sound finally prompted me to install an adblocker after that last upgrade. The problem with claims like these is that they're not trustworthy anymore.
    - kbart 10y ago
      If you don't trust a publisher, there's no reason to whitelist it anyway. Dealing with any business entity always involves some amount of trust: a trust that your order will be fulfilled, your card details won't be misused, your news stories are real, milk from a local market is not spoiled etc. A business that abuses this trust doesn't stay long.
- 10y ago
Narutu 10y ago
Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ?
- archon810 10y ago
  Good idea. https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568
  - poooogles 10y ago
    >I'm the head of the webspam team at Google. (Currently on leave). From his Twitter account.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ? Yeah, because all that needs to happen to solve this entire mess is for someone, anyone at all to bring it to the attention of the right person at Google. They'll be just as shocked to hear it as Claude Rains was in Casablanca. And, rest assured, they'll take care of it. /s
Narutu 10y ago
Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ?
arca_vorago 10y ago
What ever happened to just offering a product that is in high demand and charging for it, and ignoring advertisers? There are a lot more cancers of the advertising industry than just those listed too. In particular I would say the news industry which is a shadow of its former self, is a great example. It doesnt matter what major news site I go to, theres a big half, full, middle page popup that requires an x yo be hit, or wait for this ad, or some wierd hyperlink hijacking bullshit, or any number of other douchebaggery which tells me the site considers the ad network a bigger customer than the reader. I'm mostly talking about on the phone, on desktop, with a combination of ublock origin and others this is greatly reduced, but only a small subset of the population uses those. Our country is in what amounts to a constitutional democratic crisis of epic proportions but ads are interfering with citizens informing themselves due to recursive feedback loops between publishers and advertisers. Dont even get me started on how the standard SV business model I see is: create something semi novel, get a bunch of users, sell company, new owners exploit users for advertising, ride the wave until the crash. Or how people pay money for cable but still sit through 18 minutes of brainwashing, mindnumbing commercials for the priviledge of paying! Its a big ol racket basket of bullshit. Cancer barely even begins to describe it. How about stage 4 metasticised cancer of the everything.
mrdrozdov 10y ago
Publishers can blacklist ads, so unless they have tried to do so and failed then this is a way to shift blame from themselves on to a system that has been helping them all along.
spiderfarmer 10y ago
What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad blockers can't block you. (unless they target you specifically) - if you don't get an ad in return, you can fill that space with your own fallback ads - the ad network also does some kind of sentiment analysis so it doesn't show ads for Donald Trump on a page that's critical about him - the ad network immediately severs ties with anyone who abuses the system
- _Understated_ 10y ago
  Or perhaps, all ads are just plain html... no scripts or videos.
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    Ideally, this would be a choice for the publisher. I spent a lot of time making my pages fast, so I would not request video ads.
- ju-st 10y ago
  what about fraud?
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    As in? Both views and clicks can still be tracked so fraud will have to be dealt with in the same way as it is right now. If you are saying that fraud is harder to detect without building user profiles, that might be so. But it's not impossible. If you are saying that ads can be changed into clickbait I guess you'll have find a way to deal with that. I think an ad network should have an active relationship with both advertisers and publishers and not the anonymous, fully automated, crappy relationship Google has right now.
dave2000 10y ago
I block ads so perhaps one of the many "we owe it to site owners to not block ads" types can explain an alternative solution which doesn't involve me paying for stuff I don't want and which both slows my devices and drains their batteries.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Universal content syndication / income-indexed broadband (or total content) tax. $100/year will cover all Internet ads. $500/year will cover all advertising. Period. That's money you're already paying. Oh, and that's Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, pretty much. The rest of the world gets awesome content for no charge.
  - dave2000 10y ago
    I'm already paying that? I would never opt into advertising like that were it available. Most of the sites on the internet can just die for all I care. I'd still do online banking, buy stuff from amazon, read news on the BBC's sites. I don't mind paying individual sites if they ever wake up and offer that possibility but i'm not holding my breath. But as long as the choice is "streaming video/running javascript/annoying popups/privacy violation" vs that site going away, well...bye bye.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Advertising has costs. They're paid by consumers. My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my maths check out, that's $500/year. Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser. I'll see if I cant find an excellent HN comment made a ways back (and not by me). Ah, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
      - dave2000 10y ago
        Thank you for taking the trouble to find and post it, but I don't agree with hardly any of it. Facebook is free and so even if it were true that it would be of higher quality if there was a cost associated with it, i'm happy with it the way it is. (The great is the enemy of the good and all that). I have a very minimal use of facebook; just Messenger, and that's a great little app. If my usage of Facebook is paying for the infrastructure (and for Whatsapp, which I prefer because of the encryption) then so be it. I'm glad to be a part of it; I don't feel used or violated at all. They're welcome to whatever data they can clean from me; very little, I suspect. I don't see the ads, of course, because I use ad-blockers. The arguments about the best minds making people click on ads; well, at least the ads pay for services like google, facebook etc. A lot of very smart people are creating games, or writing blogs, or whatever. Utterly artless (most games are not art using any meaningful definition of the word) distractions from life. But that's their choice, and the consumers who use them. I'm not going to start paying for search engines or facebook or email etc any time soon. The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.
Faint 10y ago
This whole thing would actually be technically quite easy to solve: just introduce new attribute to iframe, say f.ex. you could have traffic-limit="10MB", and request-limit="5". Browser would block the iframe and anything that runs in it cold, if it exceeds limits. In an ad-auction one would sell the ad space with the knowledge of those limits. Publisher would have perfect control on how heavy ads they allow on their page. Ad networks could still run arbitrary js. And tracking the amount of raw traffic or requests on a separate iframe should not be hard to implement.
- ojosilva 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be easy to just... var iframe = document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.src = '(ad url here)'; document.body.appendChild(iframe); For every new ad?
  - Mikushi 10y ago
    Yup it would be, and as someone working in the ad tech industry it's most definitely what would happen.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Sure, and since that code runs inside the frame because you're not crazy enough to let it out of its box, the new nested frame shares the same budget. No problem.
kerkeslager 10y ago
What it comes down to for me is this: businesses don't have some god-given right to exist. If you can't get people to give money to your business enough to at least cover your costs, then your business should go out of business. If we enter into a business relationship, I will pay you for a good or service that you want. I will be obligated to do so because we came to an agreement in which you provide me the good or service and I give you money. But I'm not obligated to pay you money if I don't want to, and in turn, you wouldn't be obligated to provide me with your good or service. If not enough people give you money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business. If you enter into a business relationship with an advertiser, good luck. That has nothing to do with me. I get that you came to an agreement with the advertiser in which you provide them with ad viewers and they give you money, but it's not my responsibility to help you hold up your end of the bargain by viewing ads. At best advertisers are wasting my attention to try to sell me something I don't want or need. At worst, they're lying to me, collecting my private data, installing malware on my devices. Advertising is almost universally reprehensible. I want nothing to do with them. If advertisers don't pay you enough money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business. Of course, if I don't view your ads, you aren't obligated to provide me with your good or service. I fully support sites that use anti-adblocking banners. I mean I support them morally, not financially; if I come across such a banner I'll leave. There are arguments about whose responsibility it is when ads do reprehensible things: is it the ad network or the publisher? This strikes me as similar to arguing whether the hit man or the person who hired him is responsible. Don't take money to do reprehensible things and you won't have this problem. There's also an argument floating around that ads are the only things that makes quality content possible. This is obviously false: I remember the 90s and content was better pre-advertising. Sheldon Brown's website[1] is still the best website if you want to choose a bike that fits your needs. Erowid[2] is still the best resource for information on drug harm reduction. And decades of development have only made things better for non-ad models: even without a packaged solution like Patreon it's not hard to include donations or paid subscriptions on your website. Yes, some businesses will not survive the transition to non-ad models, but we have good reason to believe that the BuzzFeeds and Gawkers of the world will be disproportionately represented in that number. I'm looking forward to it. [1] http://sheldonbrown.com/ http://sheldonbrown.com/ [2] https://www.erowid.org/ https://www.erowid.org/
lpgauth 10y ago
This as nothing to do with VPAID[1], it's the player that decides how many ads to play. VPAID is just an IAB standard for video ads... [1] http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interface-definition-vpaid-2-0/ http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interf...
- phamilton 10y ago
  That's mostly true. The player decides how long to allow the ads to play. It's very possible to put multiple ads in a single VPAID unit.
  - lpgauth 10y ago
    Sure, but the player will decide how many ads to play.
    - phamilton 10y ago
      That's my point. The player will decide how many VPAID units to play. The VPAID unit can show multiple ads and essentially lie to the player saying it's a single ad. This happens, and is actually on the mild end of abuse.
- archon810 10y ago
  Every single time I've seen a VPAID ad, it's done what you're seeing in the linked post. It enables advertisers to do nasty and obnoxious things, easily abuse the system without punishment, and so it gets the beating end of my stick.
alistproducer2 10y ago
This is exactly why I have JavaScript turned off on mobile and selectively for some desktop site (politico nd salon are two examples of ba actors). As a die hard JavaScript guy, I hate doing this. The performance gains have been so large that I dont miss JavaScript any more. There are a few sites that demand it and I make the determination whether or not to enable JavaScript based on how badly I want to read or do whatever is at that site.
sunstone 10y ago
On my desktop the fan literally starts winding up for takeoff when I hit one of these pages. Taken across all the users how much electricity is just being wasted by these things? Perhaps there should be a running "hall of shame" listing of the most egregious offending pages. Sure it's not their fault directly but these days few organizations want to be associated with the useless wasting of energy.
cantlin 10y ago
At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important. We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it. We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!" Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it. The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry. I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more. Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain. [0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. May I ask, did anyone tried to talk to the management about the long term effects of this? Long term = people will eventually learn to avoid your site because BBC feels much more responsive.
  - cantlin 10y ago
    We spent a lot of time talking about that balance. The thing to remember is that these conversations are happening in the context of an industry that's in structural decline. You have ever lower print revenues, and Facebook and Google taking 80%+ of the spend that's moving to digital. And then you have a sales culture incentivised on short-term outcomes. In that environment it becomes really hard to turn down a buck. My two cents right now would be that consumer revenues (people paying you directly) is probably the only way to run a profitable generalist news company. That, or have the backing of a nation state (BBC) or philanthropic institution. If you want to run a business from ads on the internet, you need a great case for why you're a better option than Facebook, and most news companies just can't make that case.
whatever_dude 10y ago
And people complained about Flash, as if it was the cause. It was just one of the effects. We moved on, and now it's even worse because now it's one additional http hit for every resource requested (images, jsons, etc). Things were as bad before with tags and tracking and analytics and whatnot, but at least many of the resources loaded were self-contained in a well compressed SWF file. Hopefully now we're realizing it's not about the technology involved, but what people actually do with it.
grandalf 10y ago
For some reason I ignore ads when I'm reading content. Nonetheless, once sites started moving to full interruption ads, I decided to use adblock. What boggles my mind is that people actually look at the ads and click on them and buy things.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  People don't have to click on ads for them to be useful. You can't click on a billboard.
deleted 10y ago
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natch 10y ago
OK, so this guy is complaining about a cancer inflicted on us by advertisers like Google, while posting on a site that (speaking of cancers nobody is talking about) requires a Google login to view. I agree with his point, but the obliviousness to the problem caused by his choice of blogging platform is a bit rich.
- brohee 10y ago
  Doesn't require a Google login for me...
  - natch 10y ago
    You're probably already logged in.
- wtracy 10y ago
  OTOH, he literally got Google to pay for hosting his essays (I've never seen an ad on a G+ page, has anyone else?) that tear apart Google's practices, which I find even richer.
tlrobinson 10y ago
One of the ad blocker blockers I came across had the balls to suggest blocking ads could negatively affect the performance of the site. I laughed, then dropped into the DOM inspector to remove the blocker overlay element.
- x0 10y ago
  I usually use the ad blocker on those overlays
- ojii 10y ago
  Probably bloomberg? They have this hilarious ad-blocker blocker popup: We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site. No bloomberg, the ad-blocker positively affects the performance and content on your site. For the best experience, make sure your adblocker blacklist is up to date.
kazinator 10y ago
The fact that video objects can be started programmatically is the problem. There should be no API for a page to start a video; it should be only possible for a video to start via a UI action. It's not just a problem with ads, but with videos in general. If I land in a video-hosting site, I don't want the video to start.
- mjevans 10y ago
  I agree that playing, fullscreening, etc, a video should be a /protected/ action. However I believe that an end user should have SOME mechanism of allowing such actions on their behalf. If this sounds like a security model you are correct. Currently the lowest hanging fruit security model would be allowing a plugin to run client side and white-listing which domains it can work with (is triggered/loaded on).
gregatragenet3 10y ago
I can see why advertising networks want to use ads which slow down browsers. The only ads I've 'clicked on' lately are those where the site was loading slowly and the bowser registered my click late, on an ad window which changed page layout as it loaded. I think most clickthroughs these days are from the page layout jumping around while rendering and not real. If the page rendered quickly you'd loose all these accidental clicks.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
Block all ads, all the time. No exception. It's not an ad blocker. It's malware protection.
BooneJS 10y ago
Some people, like my elderly father, live in an area where it's dial-up or Verizon LTE MiFi with severe data caps (~14 GB for $100 per month). He's an old-school newspaper & magazine reader, so advertisements don't offend him. He actually looks at them from time to time as he reads ESPN and on-line newspapers. However, page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in his pocket to purchase the products and services being advertised. Something needs to give.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in his pocket Install Firefox and NoScript for him. Turn off Javascript completely, everywhere, except on a handful of whitelisted sites. That's what I use, every day, and it's really no problem to surf the Web that way. You miss some of the pictures, you miss 99% of the ads, you're not constantly wallowing in the advertising cesspool.
cwilkes 10y ago
I'm more angry that clicking on this link on my iPhone even in Safari's Private browser launches the Google Plus application. Why not just go to the webpage? And why launch another app that can identify me from an app that is meant to not allow that?
tengkahwee 10y ago
Unfortunately ad technology and creative companies are not using the VPAID standard properly. Essentially VPAID is simply a JS file. One really bad VPAID I seen is generated through Adobe Animate CC and meshed with a bunch of custom code with jQuery in it. The image assets are all oversized because Samsung Galaxy S6 edge supports 2560 x 1440 and it wasn't resized to fit desktop proportions. The VPAID standard doesn't constrain the designer in terms of payload and how many connections to send.
timdorr 10y ago
How is something like this even economical? All those servers to keep up with that request rate and all that bandwidth spent. Even as costs go down, I don't see how anyone can break even on this. The tiny fraction of a penny earned on this ad is surely outweighed by the cost to display it. And also the follow-on costs of increasing bounce rates and less time-on-site. Publishers have to be seeing less value in these kinds of ads that perform this way. It doesn't make any kind of economical sense!
wcummings 10y ago
I can only speak as an implementer: fuck VPAID
ademarre 10y ago
Why is the online advertising industry so slow to address performance problems? Doing so is clearly in their best interest. Don't give people a reason to hate your product, especially when it's in your power to make it better.
some1else 10y ago
We have a real duty to maintain engineering excellence, before all our tech is spaghetti. What happens once the MegaBytes don't count anymore?
pmcgrathm 10y ago
It isn't the ad itself that is causing those streams of requests, but rather the ad technology vendors buying or selling the data from the ad server from which the ad was delivered. Don't blame the publisher or advertiser for not noticing that their 'anti-fraud' vendor is sending itself events every millisecond.
pmcgrathm 10y ago
It isn't the ad itself that is causing those streams of requests, but rather the ad technology vendors buying or selling the data from the ad server from which the ad was delivered. Don't blame the publisher or advertiser for not noticing that their 'anti-fraud' vendor is sending itself events every millisecond.
faebi 10y ago
At least now I know why my old iPad 2 becomes unusable on certain websites. Life without an adblocker is really not nice.
jakeogh 10y ago
Anyone looking for a DNS level blocking solution, please checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate

1045 points by archon810 10y ago

I'm a bit shocked about the state of advertising. When I was making websites (~early 2000s), there were a lot more options to choose from, it seems. Now you basically just have Google and this opaque network of algorithmic auctions. Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from. I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video (thank God), but you could have unobtrusive text links, you could have banners, little buttons, HTML blocks, and so on. And yes, also annoying pop-ups and flash ads... You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today, but I believe it was not nearly as bad as we think. It was certainly better than some alternatives (horrible pop-up-ads that installed dialers, does anybody remember them?) Back then, I was proud to not serve evil or annoying ads, and to promote articles from partners on my site - including setting links to them to promote their page ranks. (That Google shows links among search results that they get money for, but forbids slightly improving the position of search results when other people got money for it tells a lot IMHO.) One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites?

matthewmacleod 10y ago
You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today Is this the case? I've seen absolutely tonnes of blatantly paid-for content across the web, and if anything there seems to be much more than there ever was.
- nvdk 10y ago
  they just call it "native advertising" now :)
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    Or sponsored, which is fine by me.
- DanBC 10y ago
  I'm not sure vilified is the right word, but the FTC in the US and the ASA in the UK have both said that paid-for content needs to be marked as such. The ASA rules are pretty tight. The user has to know something is paid for content before clicking. So a YouTuber putting out a sponsored video needs to include something in the title of the video, and the link, saying "sponsored content". A banner at the start of the video isn't enough.
  - anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I wish a lot more people knew the ASA were a part of EASA[1] and that EASA even exist. ASA are happy to get involved with complaints about a wide range of countries[2] (basically all Europe, Canada, Brazil, Chile and the UK Commonwealth). eg, if you complain about an advert from a Canadian firm the ASA will refer it to the appropriate national agency for you. My limited understanding is this is reciprocal for residents of those nations too. The rules are being flouted wholesale, yet many nations have an ASA that could do something about it. [1] http://www.easa-alliance.org/ http://www.easa-alliance.org/ [2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-border-complaints.aspx https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-b...
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Be wary of terms such as “sponsorship” and “in association with” The ASA is generally likely to consider terms such as “sponsored content” as referring to a traditional sponsorship relationship, where material has been financially sponsored but over which the creator retains editorial control. Sponsorship of this kind is not covered by the CAP Code. Using such terms to describe an ad feature is unlikely to be acceptable. Following an ASA challenge, the ASA ruled against an ad that was included in a “sponsored section” of a website and labelled as “in association with”, considering that the labels in themselves did not make clear the commercial nature of the content
pjc50 10y ago
One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites? There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud the advertiser.
- archon810 10y ago
  That's only 1 of many reasons. Another big one being it's a lot more time-consuming and costly to run your own ad sales team, you always have to worry about filling all ads in all countries, and the average CPMs you get may not be nearly as good as the ones without any headaches from big ad networks (well, headaches from the advertiser acquisition perspective).
- a3n 10y ago
  How do physical newspapers prove ad serving to their buyers? I'm certain they don't point to every single newspaper thrown in a driveway.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Third parties and surveys e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Counc... Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.
    - a3n 10y ago
      And that, eventually, is going to have to be good enough for online publishers and advertisers.
    - kbart 10y ago
      So why can't the same be done on websites? If numbers of views can't be confirmed without spying on users or trusting shady actors to do that for you, it means the business model that is based on this metric is skewed.
ddebernardy 10y ago
> Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from. There was a lot of consolidation. But they're still around. They're basically that opaque network of algorithmic auctions you mentionned, in fact. If they can't display one of their direct clients' ads, they sell the spot to the highest bidder.

jacquesm 10y ago

At some point the cost of advertising to the medium in terms of user disengagement will exceed the income. I can't wait for it to happen, then at least we will reach some kind of steady-state. I really pity the newspapers, especially the ones that also have an online presence, they are caught between a rock and a hard place and no matter what they do they end up hurting themselves, their employers, users or shareholders. It's very hard to transition from a 1800's model to one that will work 200 years later. Bandwidth being as cheap as it is means that advertisers really don't care about how many bytes they need to shove down the pipe in order to make a sale. End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem, to them it is mission accomplished and the website owner/publisher will end up holding the bag.

archon810 10y ago
I find it pretty ironic that Google constantly tries to optimize for every byte in some of its products, pushes for speed and mobile optimization, yet ends up completely negating that in its advertising offerings. This and the malware that gets through. Stop allowing arbitrary Javascript in ads, and that's it - problem solved. But nope, the cat and mouse chase goes on, and maldvertisers are always a step ahead.
kbart 10y ago
"End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's not the advertisers problem" Well, it is their problem or else we wouldn't have this "crisis" of Internet ads now and cries of advertisers/publishers. After all, you can only push a limited amount of bullshit down the users throat before they start throwing up.. It took many years of abuse by countless browser bars, pop-up ads, auto play videos, inflated network bills for a casual user to start using ad-blockers.
ojosilva 10y ago
I wonder too if there are some good data on user disengagement. Lately there seems to be a spike of autoplay videos in the sites I visit frequently. I just immediately hit the Back button as my silent "protest", but I can't help feeling stupid, like I'm the only human being that doesn't seem to enjoy loud videos running in the background. Where do these media companies get their data from? Data that says autoplay videos create more engagement or revenue or something that can make up for people, like me, just running away? The other day Fortune magazine surprised me with that same thing, and the video wasn't even related to what the article was about. Does it come from Facebook's success with _silent_ autoplay? These are not rhetoric questions, I'm really curious to understand the logic behind this.

Dunofrey 10y ago

I still won't use ad blockers, I find them akin to stealing from content creators, but I'm getting close.

krylon 10y ago
After several incidents where malware was distributed through ads, I think it is fair to call it self defence.
- rvense 10y ago
  "The fact that you can tell I'm using an ad-blocker makes me feel justified in using one."
- blahi 10y ago
  This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale. The lion's share of malware distribution is done by hacked sites where the attacker configured to deliver a payload only in 5-10% of pageviews in order to delay detection.
  - kbart 10y ago
    This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale" Not only. My older relatives happily click on "Congratulations, you won a million!!!" ads and end up with yet another browser bar or worse. No JavaScript required.
    - blahi 10y ago
      Parent talks about distribution of malware...
Touche 10y ago
I don't know why you feel that way, do you feel bad about tearing an ad out of a magazine?
- 10y ago

franciscop 10y ago

If someone needs to have an ad solution to have their website running it is NOT a business that should exist. It's like we say restaurant owners should support the mafia because otherwise they cannot make money in the neighborhood. Or any other criminal(ish) activity. "Without advertising we wouldn't be able to run this" MAYBE it really means you shouldn't run it at all, but don't force advertising(+malware) down your users throat just to justify an unsound business decision. Edit: reworded to avoid confussion

lazyjones 10y ago
> If someone needs to have an obscure ad solution to have their website running it is NOT a business that should exist. It's not a simple black/white choice in most cases. As a top 10K website publisher, you have many advertising options. Some are considered safe and user-friendly (Google, DoubleClick - IMHO no longer justified) and others less so (pop-ups, various auctioned stuff). You then get to decide on these options by estimating the potential revenue vs. negative effect on users for each. Some sites are greedier than others, some marketing folks more convincing than UX managers, many people just don't know what to expect until they get their first sh*tstorm from users. OTOH there are thousands of worthless sites that obviously only exist to serve ads, some major publishers included.
- archon810 10y ago
  Pertaining to the same quote, obscure isn't part of the equation here. Almost all ad networks are guilty, including the biggest (i.e. the least obscure by definition) ones, like AdSense/AdX.
- franciscop 10y ago
  Sorry I probably explained it wrong (not native English speaker). The important part of the quote is not "obscure", you could remove it and keep my original meaning. What I mean is that if it's not a sustainable business then you'd need to add advertising to make it so. So maybe it shouldn't be called a business at all. But don't force advertising on your users just because you made an unsound business decision.
10y ago

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> A single VPAID ad absolutely demolishes site performance on mobile and desktop, and we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers. The site is responsible for including ads; "publishers" should get the full blame from their readers. The publishers themselves can complain to the ad network they use, but readers are right to just blame the publishers.

mpclark 10y ago
It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with. The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense, the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of networks were infiltrating through that little window. The only reasonable action was to just turn it all off and forgo the marginal ad revenue. We now only host ads we have sold direct.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  >It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with. Then the publisher should stop working with networks that do this. That's not in our control as users, only the publisher can do that.
  - archon810 10y ago
    The problem is pretty much all networks do this.
    - nailer 10y ago
      Maybe there's a market there? An ad network content providers can trust. Even well known news websites have ios app store redirects that stop content from being viewed.

snarfy 10y ago

Sites need to be legally liable for installing malware on your computer. That will solve all of this. I can go to prison for clicking on the wrong link but somehow they get away with drive-by ransomware installs.

chopin 10y ago
They are not? At least I'd think it violates CFAA. I don't know the CFAA in detail, does it have an exemption for site hosters?
archon810 10y ago
This is laughable. If site owners could go to jail every time a 3rd-party code they're not fully responsible for does something bad, they'd all be in jail now. https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-analysis/2015/08/large-malvertising-campaign-takes-on-yahoo/ https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-analysis/2015/08/large-... http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-b... Etc.
- franciscop 10y ago
  Then the only standing ones would be site owners who care enough to make sure they don't allow malware on their visitor from their site. What's the problem?
  - archon810 10y ago
    Because that's not how the world works. You'd jail 99.999% of publishers and the only ones not jailed would be ones who don't have any advertising.
    - J_Darnley 10y ago
      Sounds great to me. People only publishing what they want others to read, no clickbait, absolutely marvellous.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_Understated_ 10y ago

In most walks of life we happily pay for something that provides us value: Cars, phones, shoes etc. I don't see the web/app ecosystem as any different although owners (that's app creators and web site owners/creators) feel they can make more by selling our lives to a third party - That's not something I want to happen with my details I will block your system for doing so. If I feel your site/app is not providing me with value then I likely will uninstall/never come back. It's a choice thing. I have paid for apps in the past and will continue to do so in the future but only for stuff that brings me real value. I may not be the biggest supporter out there but I have a couple of Patreon's running (is that the right term?) for people that provide me with value. Let's face it, there is a whole load of shite content out there... so maybe we need to cull the herd a bit. Anyway, you can run a website for almost nothing these days and spending, say, $50 a month will get you some serious hosting solutions so if your business is just exploiting my browsing habits and selling my metadata on then I will happily grab the popcorn and watch your site burn.

blahi 10y ago
Yeah, yeah, yeah, google and facebook are almost charcoal now.
nxzero 10y ago
Curious, given how strongly you feel about the commercial use of personally identifiable information (pii) - how do you feel about the collection, use, sharing, etc. of pii by governments?
- _Understated_ 10y ago
  I don't agree with Governments doing it en-mass (I have no problem with targetted surveillance based on reasonable suspicion) and I have signed various petitions to that effect over the years. The only real option, apart from revolution, is to move to another country that doesn't do it but I don't think there is one now. Of bigger concern is that I am in the minority: Most of my circle believe in the terrorist/paedo rhetoric the Government spins and think its justifiable. As for the commercial stuff, my only problem is if I can't avoid it or I really have to go out of my way to avoid it but so far my tinfoil hat hasn't been breached, e.g. my wife has various loyalty cards but I don't want to carry one... I have that choice with commercial entities I'm in the UK btw.

bernarpa 10y ago

I manage ads in several mobile apps and I've chosen to disable full screen video ads. Still Google's AdMob mail hints keep recommending to activate them as well in order to get more revenue. More revenue for me and more revenue for the ad provider, that's the only reason.

archon810 10y ago
I'm on a war path with these video ads, but advertising networks don't give us enough (or any) tools to disable serving them. Most of the time, it's either all or nothing. Some let you disable certain types of ads, including AdSense (it has a VPAID checkbox now that I think about it), but when I reached out to AdX people about it, they were not helpful so far (their recommendation was to turn off anything that says "video" in the OptIn tab, except that does not get rid of these VPAID ads). sovrn was a network I dropped for this very reason - they kept serving VPAID ads and didn't give me a way to turn them off. The list goes on.

bkmartin 10y ago

Yep... I have seen this increasing steadily for a while now. Most major "news" sites have this garbage being served. Then these same sites decide to autoload video at the top of the page and their site becomes completely unusable. Do they not realize how horrible the experience is for the user?

omerhj 10y ago
It took CNN years to get the aspect ratio of their videos right -- all of their web video used to look like standard def TV stretched out to a HD screen. So the answer is almost certainly no.

ungzd 10y ago

BTW, nowadays everyone talks about AI, machine learning and "mobile-first". But when I open any mobile app or any mobile website with ads I see only ads of "clash of kings" and similar scammy games. They collect lots of data but ads have no targeting at all. At least ads on mobile phones. I can't understand it.

vintermann 10y ago
The Nutrimatic drink machine model of customization.
dandare 10y ago
You are simply the scammy games industry's target group :D
rm999 10y ago
I used to work in the industry - mobile ads can be quite targeted. My guess is apps like clash of clans appeal to a wide range of people and are backed by heavy ad spending. This means a wide variety of people will be targeted with their ads. Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer probably isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers, or ads for retirement communities.
- creshal 10y ago
  > Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer probably isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers, or ads for retirement communities. You'd be surprised. I bought a travel sewing kit five years ago on Amazon, and ever since I'm getting advertisements and "recommendations" for handbags, makeup and high-heeled shoes. It's so blatantly sexist and wrong it's almost funny again. Almost.
  - staticelf 10y ago
    Is it though? Just because you aren't interested in these other recommendations and connected ads doesn't mean the wide majority who purchases sewing kits aren't as well. If this "blantantly sexist" ads were wrong no one would purchase such ads. Sure they may be stereotypical, but that's what targeted ads are all about, creating data driven stereotypes that later can be used for increasing sales and relativity.

rubyfan 10y ago

This among many other reasons is why publishers lose the ad blocker debate with me.

adam-a 10y ago

I recently had a similar problem, browsing a reputable news site (newstatesman.com), I accidentally clicked an ad and got taken directly to a page containing explicit pornography. I complained to the site and they said they do what they can in terms of blacklisting ads, but they don't have enough time or staff. I can't believe there's no ad network that will take a stand against abusive advertising and actually vet the ads on their network. Surely they could get a lot of business and at least a lot of goodwill. Is it just too labour intensive?

moron4hire 10y ago
You would think some of the most profitable companies in the world could afford to hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go out.
- anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
  If you mean the sites that display ads, that's not how they work - ad companies bid on ad spaces as the page is requested.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    They could still afford to Mechanical Turk the hell out of that.
- poooogles 10y ago
  >hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go out. They do, all creatives are audited on submission. You can't provide literally ANY creative at bid time, it has to be one that's been audited. It's people that then switch the creative once the audit has been completed that are screwing everyone. It should result in you being banned from the network, but it's hard (apparently) to ban people that are paying the bills for you the ad network.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Why is it even possible to make changes after the audit?

chrismbarr 10y ago

One thing to note: When the developer tools are opened Chrome will temporarily disable the cache. When the video loops it would normally just reach into cache and re-play the file that was already downloaded. However, with devtools open it will probably re-download all the files again.

archon810 10y ago
That's not true at all. It only disables the cache if you tell it to. Like so: http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png. As you can see, that checkbox is not on in the demoed GIF. The ad code is actively requesting new ads and pinging its trackers countless times.
- chrismbarr 10y ago
  ok, sure, it's configurable. But that box is checked by default.
  - archon810 10y ago
    1. Not for any installs of Chrome I've ever had. 2. That's entirely irrelevant in this matter because it was not turned on.
anowlcalledjosh 10y ago
Totally false.
dhimes 10y ago
Excellent point.
- archon810 10y ago
  Except the part where it's not.
  - 10y ago

spiderfarmer 10y ago

Why isn't there an ad network that lets you inject ads server side? That would solve a lot of problems.

archon810 10y ago
Because any sort of page caching makes it much harder to count impressions, among other reasons.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  With HTML5 ads there are several ways around that I think?
  - archon810 10y ago
    HTML is a client-side language for browsers to interpret. I'm not sure what you mean exactly - can you please clarify?
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      HTML5 ads are like small webpages. So you can still use javascript to load tracking pixels from within the creative. https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017 https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017
mrweasel 10y ago
Because they want to be able to switch ads very quickly, and they don't want to rely on you to supply the number of ad-displays. It's not a problem getting the correct data from your server logs, but it's not difficult to imagine someone fiddling with the number and indicating that they displayed far more ads than they really did.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  Quickly changing the ad is a problem yes, but you can still track the views / clicks from with in the creative with HTML5 ads.

mtgx 10y ago

Is this really such a hard problem for Google to solve or is it just turning a blind eye to it? Can't Google limit the size of the ads somehow? The number of requests per page? Whether the ad remains a static image or it's a video? I find it hard to believe it would be that hard for Google to implement restrictions around this. And advertisers wonder why the use of adblockers is skyrocketing. If Google knows about this but isn't willing to fix it, then I worry it will allow similar stuff to work within AMP pages as well, but the difference will be you won't be able to block them unless you block the whole content as well. That would mean advertisers have learned nothing from the rise of adblockers.

marcosdumay 10y ago
Increasing Google's revenue every quarter is certainly enough of a challenge without a policy of discarding clients. Don't expect any solution from them. This is something end users (by ad-blocking) or startups (by destroying the market) can do, but not big companies.

jkot 10y ago

> I'm at 53MB downloaded and 5559 requests. That was not advertisement, but malware. It is probably running DDos attack on some website. We should block that. Anyway, at ancient days I surfed with i486 on 14.4 kbps modem. Not much has changed since.

archon810 10y ago
Did you look at the pings it was sending to its stats servers? It's not malware, some evil assholes actually created this VPAID concept with its players, trackers, and garbage performance.
- jkot 10y ago
  If it quacks like a duck...
  - archon810 10y ago
    This logic doesn't make sense. If an advertiser willingly pings itself to a ridiculous degree does not mean it's a conspiracy to bring a server (its own?) down.
    - jkot 10y ago
      If something hijacks your computer and uses excesive resources, you should assume it has hostile intentions. It is not your job to inspect packet to find out what is going on.
      - lmm 10y ago
        It is worth distinguishing between actual malice and mere incompetence, and handling them differently.
mrweasel 10y ago
>That was not advertisement, but malware. I doubt it. It more likely that someone wants to know how long the reader/users of a page are exposed to their ads. Some idiot savant then figured "Hey, we'll play a video and download the bits in chucks. Then we know how much of the videos was played, and that's the amount of time they spend on the page."

a3n 10y ago

From the comments: > Peter Dahlberg > we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers. That's because you are to blame. As far as I know nobdoy forces you to use those shitty ad networks. Look for a honest way to finance your business and don't whine. That actually makes a lot of sense. As long as Google et al. are making money from this, they have no incentive to change. Google, the automated rainbow monolith, in particular doesn't have any incentive to even listen. But if publishers take the apparently extremely inconvenient step of using other networks, this sort of shit might get cleaned up. EDIT: Perhaps I should have said "other buyers;" these problems seem closely associated with the nature of ad networks. The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?

kbart 10y ago
"The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?" Simple. Write that in big, bold letters at the top of your site. You know, the same place where that autoplay video ad usually goes.
- makomk 10y ago
  A site I sometimes frequent has a big, bold banner at the top asking people to disable adblock and claiming it doesn't use audio ads and other annoying ads. It's also the site whose video ads that autoplayed with sound finally prompted me to install an adblocker after that last upgrade. The problem with claims like these is that they're not trustworthy anymore.
  - kbart 10y ago
    If you don't trust a publisher, there's no reason to whitelist it anyway. Dealing with any business entity always involves some amount of trust: a trust that your order will be fulfilled, your card details won't be misused, your news stories are real, milk from a local market is not spoiled etc. A business that abuses this trust doesn't stay long.
10y ago

Narutu 10y ago

Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ?

archon810 10y ago
Good idea. https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568 https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568
- poooogles 10y ago
  >I'm the head of the webspam team at Google. (Currently on leave). From his Twitter account.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ? Yeah, because all that needs to happen to solve this entire mess is for someone, anyone at all to bring it to the attention of the right person at Google. They'll be just as shocked to hear it as Claude Rains was in Casablanca. And, rest assured, they'll take care of it. /s

Narutu 10y ago

Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ?

arca_vorago 10y ago

What ever happened to just offering a product that is in high demand and charging for it, and ignoring advertisers? There are a lot more cancers of the advertising industry than just those listed too. In particular I would say the news industry which is a shadow of its former self, is a great example. It doesnt matter what major news site I go to, theres a big half, full, middle page popup that requires an x yo be hit, or wait for this ad, or some wierd hyperlink hijacking bullshit, or any number of other douchebaggery which tells me the site considers the ad network a bigger customer than the reader. I'm mostly talking about on the phone, on desktop, with a combination of ublock origin and others this is greatly reduced, but only a small subset of the population uses those. Our country is in what amounts to a constitutional democratic crisis of epic proportions but ads are interfering with citizens informing themselves due to recursive feedback loops between publishers and advertisers. Dont even get me started on how the standard SV business model I see is: create something semi novel, get a bunch of users, sell company, new owners exploit users for advertising, ride the wave until the crash. Or how people pay money for cable but still sit through 18 minutes of brainwashing, mindnumbing commercials for the priviledge of paying! Its a big ol racket basket of bullshit. Cancer barely even begins to describe it. How about stage 4 metasticised cancer of the everything.

mrdrozdov 10y ago

Publishers can blacklist ads, so unless they have tried to do so and failed then this is a way to shift blame from themselves on to a system that has been helping them all along.

spiderfarmer 10y ago

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad blockers can't block you. (unless they target you specifically) - if you don't get an ad in return, you can fill that space with your own fallback ads - the ad network also does some kind of sentiment analysis so it doesn't show ads for Donald Trump on a page that's critical about him - the ad network immediately severs ties with anyone who abuses the system

_Understated_ 10y ago
Or perhaps, all ads are just plain html... no scripts or videos.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  Ideally, this would be a choice for the publisher. I spent a lot of time making my pages fast, so I would not request video ads.
ju-st 10y ago
what about fraud?
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  As in? Both views and clicks can still be tracked so fraud will have to be dealt with in the same way as it is right now. If you are saying that fraud is harder to detect without building user profiles, that might be so. But it's not impossible. If you are saying that ads can be changed into clickbait I guess you'll have find a way to deal with that. I think an ad network should have an active relationship with both advertisers and publishers and not the anonymous, fully automated, crappy relationship Google has right now.

dave2000 10y ago

I block ads so perhaps one of the many "we owe it to site owners to not block ads" types can explain an alternative solution which doesn't involve me paying for stuff I don't want and which both slows my devices and drains their batteries.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Universal content syndication / income-indexed broadband (or total content) tax. $100/year will cover all Internet ads. $500/year will cover all advertising. Period. That's money you're already paying. Oh, and that's Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, pretty much. The rest of the world gets awesome content for no charge.
- dave2000 10y ago
  I'm already paying that? I would never opt into advertising like that were it available. Most of the sites on the internet can just die for all I care. I'd still do online banking, buy stuff from amazon, read news on the BBC's sites. I don't mind paying individual sites if they ever wake up and offer that possibility but i'm not holding my breath. But as long as the choice is "streaming video/running javascript/annoying popups/privacy violation" vs that site going away, well...bye bye.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Advertising has costs. They're paid by consumers. My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my maths check out, that's $500/year. Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser. I'll see if I cant find an excellent HN comment made a ways back (and not by me). Ah, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
    - dave2000 10y ago
      Thank you for taking the trouble to find and post it, but I don't agree with hardly any of it. Facebook is free and so even if it were true that it would be of higher quality if there was a cost associated with it, i'm happy with it the way it is. (The great is the enemy of the good and all that). I have a very minimal use of facebook; just Messenger, and that's a great little app. If my usage of Facebook is paying for the infrastructure (and for Whatsapp, which I prefer because of the encryption) then so be it. I'm glad to be a part of it; I don't feel used or violated at all. They're welcome to whatever data they can clean from me; very little, I suspect. I don't see the ads, of course, because I use ad-blockers. The arguments about the best minds making people click on ads; well, at least the ads pay for services like google, facebook etc. A lot of very smart people are creating games, or writing blogs, or whatever. Utterly artless (most games are not art using any meaningful definition of the word) distractions from life. But that's their choice, and the consumers who use them. I'm not going to start paying for search engines or facebook or email etc any time soon. The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.

Faint 10y ago

This whole thing would actually be technically quite easy to solve: just introduce new attribute to iframe, say f.ex. you could have traffic-limit="10MB", and request-limit="5". Browser would block the iframe and anything that runs in it cold, if it exceeds limits. In an ad-auction one would sell the ad space with the knowledge of those limits. Publisher would have perfect control on how heavy ads they allow on their page. Ad networks could still run arbitrary js. And tracking the amount of raw traffic or requests on a separate iframe should not be hard to implement.

ojosilva 10y ago
Wouldn't it be easy to just... var iframe = document.createElement('iframe'); iframe.src = '(ad url here)'; document.body.appendChild(iframe); For every new ad?
- Mikushi 10y ago
  Yup it would be, and as someone working in the ad tech industry it's most definitely what would happen.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Sure, and since that code runs inside the frame because you're not crazy enough to let it out of its box, the new nested frame shares the same budget. No problem.

kerkeslager 10y ago

What it comes down to for me is this: businesses don't have some god-given right to exist. If you can't get people to give money to your business enough to at least cover your costs, then your business should go out of business. If we enter into a business relationship, I will pay you for a good or service that you want. I will be obligated to do so because we came to an agreement in which you provide me the good or service and I give you money. But I'm not obligated to pay you money if I don't want to, and in turn, you wouldn't be obligated to provide me with your good or service. If not enough people give you money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business. If you enter into a business relationship with an advertiser, good luck. That has nothing to do with me. I get that you came to an agreement with the advertiser in which you provide them with ad viewers and they give you money, but it's not my responsibility to help you hold up your end of the bargain by viewing ads. At best advertisers are wasting my attention to try to sell me something I don't want or need. At worst, they're lying to me, collecting my private data, installing malware on my devices. Advertising is almost universally reprehensible. I want nothing to do with them. If advertisers don't pay you enough money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business. Of course, if I don't view your ads, you aren't obligated to provide me with your good or service. I fully support sites that use anti-adblocking banners. I mean I support them morally, not financially; if I come across such a banner I'll leave. There are arguments about whose responsibility it is when ads do reprehensible things: is it the ad network or the publisher? This strikes me as similar to arguing whether the hit man or the person who hired him is responsible. Don't take money to do reprehensible things and you won't have this problem. There's also an argument floating around that ads are the only things that makes quality content possible. This is obviously false: I remember the 90s and content was better pre-advertising. Sheldon Brown's website[1] is still the best website if you want to choose a bike that fits your needs. Erowid[2] is still the best resource for information on drug harm reduction. And decades of development have only made things better for non-ad models: even without a packaged solution like Patreon it's not hard to include donations or paid subscriptions on your website. Yes, some businesses will not survive the transition to non-ad models, but we have good reason to believe that the BuzzFeeds and Gawkers of the world will be disproportionately represented in that number. I'm looking forward to it. [1] http://sheldonbrown.com/ http://sheldonbrown.com/ [2] https://www.erowid.org/ https://www.erowid.org/

lpgauth 10y ago

This as nothing to do with VPAID[1], it's the player that decides how many ads to play. VPAID is just an IAB standard for video ads... [1] http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interface-definition-vpaid-2-0/ http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interf...

phamilton 10y ago
That's mostly true. The player decides how long to allow the ads to play. It's very possible to put multiple ads in a single VPAID unit.
- lpgauth 10y ago
  Sure, but the player will decide how many ads to play.
  - phamilton 10y ago
    That's my point. The player will decide how many VPAID units to play. The VPAID unit can show multiple ads and essentially lie to the player saying it's a single ad. This happens, and is actually on the mild end of abuse.
archon810 10y ago
Every single time I've seen a VPAID ad, it's done what you're seeing in the linked post. It enables advertisers to do nasty and obnoxious things, easily abuse the system without punishment, and so it gets the beating end of my stick.

alistproducer2 10y ago

This is exactly why I have JavaScript turned off on mobile and selectively for some desktop site (politico nd salon are two examples of ba actors). As a die hard JavaScript guy, I hate doing this. The performance gains have been so large that I dont miss JavaScript any more. There are a few sites that demand it and I make the determination whether or not to enable JavaScript based on how badly I want to read or do whatever is at that site.

sunstone 10y ago

On my desktop the fan literally starts winding up for takeoff when I hit one of these pages. Taken across all the users how much electricity is just being wasted by these things? Perhaps there should be a running "hall of shame" listing of the most egregious offending pages. Sure it's not their fault directly but these days few organizations want to be associated with the useless wasting of energy.

cantlin 10y ago

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important. We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it. We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!" Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it. The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry. I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more. Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain. [0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid

whatever_dude 10y ago
Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.
pawadu 10y ago
Thanks for sharing this. May I ask, did anyone tried to talk to the management about the long term effects of this? Long term = people will eventually learn to avoid your site because BBC feels much more responsive.
- cantlin 10y ago
  We spent a lot of time talking about that balance. The thing to remember is that these conversations are happening in the context of an industry that's in structural decline. You have ever lower print revenues, and Facebook and Google taking 80%+ of the spend that's moving to digital. And then you have a sales culture incentivised on short-term outcomes. In that environment it becomes really hard to turn down a buck. My two cents right now would be that consumer revenues (people paying you directly) is probably the only way to run a profitable generalist news company. That, or have the backing of a nation state (BBC) or philanthropic institution. If you want to run a business from ads on the internet, you need a great case for why you're a better option than Facebook, and most news companies just can't make that case.

whatever_dude 10y ago

And people complained about Flash, as if it was the cause. It was just one of the effects. We moved on, and now it's even worse because now it's one additional http hit for every resource requested (images, jsons, etc). Things were as bad before with tags and tracking and analytics and whatnot, but at least many of the resources loaded were self-contained in a well compressed SWF file. Hopefully now we're realizing it's not about the technology involved, but what people actually do with it.

grandalf 10y ago

For some reason I ignore ads when I'm reading content. Nonetheless, once sites started moving to full interruption ads, I decided to use adblock. What boggles my mind is that people actually look at the ads and click on them and buy things.

umanwizard 10y ago
People don't have to click on ads for them to be useful. You can't click on a billboard.

deleted 10y ago

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deleted 10y ago

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natch 10y ago

OK, so this guy is complaining about a cancer inflicted on us by advertisers like Google, while posting on a site that (speaking of cancers nobody is talking about) requires a Google login to view. I agree with his point, but the obliviousness to the problem caused by his choice of blogging platform is a bit rich.

brohee 10y ago
Doesn't require a Google login for me...
- natch 10y ago
  You're probably already logged in.
wtracy 10y ago
OTOH, he literally got Google to pay for hosting his essays (I've never seen an ad on a G+ page, has anyone else?) that tear apart Google's practices, which I find even richer.

tlrobinson 10y ago

One of the ad blocker blockers I came across had the balls to suggest blocking ads could negatively affect the performance of the site. I laughed, then dropped into the DOM inspector to remove the blocker overlay element.

x0 10y ago
I usually use the ad blocker on those overlays
ojii 10y ago
Probably bloomberg? They have this hilarious ad-blocker blocker popup: We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site. No bloomberg, the ad-blocker positively affects the performance and content on your site. For the best experience, make sure your adblocker blacklist is up to date.

kazinator 10y ago

The fact that video objects can be started programmatically is the problem. There should be no API for a page to start a video; it should be only possible for a video to start via a UI action. It's not just a problem with ads, but with videos in general. If I land in a video-hosting site, I don't want the video to start.

mjevans 10y ago
I agree that playing, fullscreening, etc, a video should be a /protected/ action. However I believe that an end user should have SOME mechanism of allowing such actions on their behalf. If this sounds like a security model you are correct. Currently the lowest hanging fruit security model would be allowing a plugin to run client side and white-listing which domains it can work with (is triggered/loaded on).

gregatragenet3 10y ago

I can see why advertising networks want to use ads which slow down browsers. The only ads I've 'clicked on' lately are those where the site was loading slowly and the bowser registered my click late, on an ad window which changed page layout as it loaded. I think most clickthroughs these days are from the page layout jumping around while rendering and not real. If the page rendered quickly you'd loose all these accidental clicks.

forrestthewoods 10y ago

Block all ads, all the time. No exception. It's not an ad blocker. It's malware protection.

BooneJS 10y ago

Some people, like my elderly father, live in an area where it's dial-up or Verizon LTE MiFi with severe data caps (~14 GB for $100 per month). He's an old-school newspaper & magazine reader, so advertisements don't offend him. He actually looks at them from time to time as he reads ESPN and on-line newspapers. However, page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in his pocket to purchase the products and services being advertised. Something needs to give.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in his pocket Install Firefox and NoScript for him. Turn off Javascript completely, everywhere, except on a handful of whitelisted sites. That's what I use, every day, and it's really no problem to surf the Web that way. You miss some of the pictures, you miss 99% of the ads, you're not constantly wallowing in the advertising cesspool.

cwilkes 10y ago

I'm more angry that clicking on this link on my iPhone even in Safari's Private browser launches the Google Plus application. Why not just go to the webpage? And why launch another app that can identify me from an app that is meant to not allow that?

tengkahwee 10y ago

Unfortunately ad technology and creative companies are not using the VPAID standard properly. Essentially VPAID is simply a JS file. One really bad VPAID I seen is generated through Adobe Animate CC and meshed with a bunch of custom code with jQuery in it. The image assets are all oversized because Samsung Galaxy S6 edge supports 2560 x 1440 and it wasn't resized to fit desktop proportions. The VPAID standard doesn't constrain the designer in terms of payload and how many connections to send.

timdorr 10y ago

How is something like this even economical? All those servers to keep up with that request rate and all that bandwidth spent. Even as costs go down, I don't see how anyone can break even on this. The tiny fraction of a penny earned on this ad is surely outweighed by the cost to display it. And also the follow-on costs of increasing bounce rates and less time-on-site. Publishers have to be seeing less value in these kinds of ads that perform this way. It doesn't make any kind of economical sense!

wcummings 10y ago

I can only speak as an implementer: fuck VPAID

ademarre 10y ago

Why is the online advertising industry so slow to address performance problems? Doing so is clearly in their best interest. Don't give people a reason to hate your product, especially when it's in your power to make it better.

some1else 10y ago

We have a real duty to maintain engineering excellence, before all our tech is spaghetti. What happens once the MegaBytes don't count anymore?

pmcgrathm 10y ago

It isn't the ad itself that is causing those streams of requests, but rather the ad technology vendors buying or selling the data from the ad server from which the ad was delivered. Don't blame the publisher or advertiser for not noticing that their 'anti-fraud' vendor is sending itself events every millisecond.

pmcgrathm 10y ago

faebi 10y ago

At least now I know why my old iPad 2 becomes unusable on certain websites. Life without an adblocker is really not nice.

jakeogh 10y ago

Anyone looking for a DNS level blocking solution, please checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate