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I'm curious why sites/blogs don't start hosting ad assets themselves and serving them from their own domain. My understanding is most ad blocking is done at the

I'm curious why sites/blogs don't start hosting ad assets themselves and serving them from their own domain. My understanding is most ad blocking is done at the host level (maybe I'm wrong and the DOM is involved too). I also think it'd be an interesting startup idea. I get that there would be some technical hurdles to overcome, especially with all the real-time bidding that goes on now. But I'm sure a couple smart people could come up with something. Could start with something as simple as a cron job, a WordPress plugin, or an nginx proxy.

drcharris 10y ago
I suspect that if I had a site, piping assets from some arbitrary external company through my host would likely expose me to dramatically larger legal liability than the current set up. It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML. Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve, but that would add a lot of extra cost to running the site. There's no real technical barrier to doing it but I suspect the legal and operational barriers are more significant. And yes, the DOM is involved too - ad blockers block URL patterns but also allow users to block DOM elements based on a selector-type syntax. The hardest ads to remove are ones where the DOM selectors are dynamic - i.e. server-side rendering producing divs with random CSS classes.
- ssalazar 10y ago
  > piping assets from some arbitrary external company through my host would likely expose me to dramatically larger legal liability than the current set up. > It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML. To an end user these sounds like features, not problems. > Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve The lack of any vetting whatsoever is a big reason why adblock is so widespread. If you don't trust it enough to transmit it through your servers, why should I trust it to run on my computer?
doozy 10y ago
In Apache it takes no more than 5 lines in an .htaccess file for a full-featured setup. Look up the ProxyPass / ProxyPassReverse directives and friends.

drcharris 10y ago

I suspect that if I had a site, piping assets from some arbitrary external company through my host would likely expose me to dramatically larger legal liability than the current set up. It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML. Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve, but that would add a lot of extra cost to running the site. There's no real technical barrier to doing it but I suspect the legal and operational barriers are more significant. And yes, the DOM is involved too - ad blockers block URL patterns but also allow users to block DOM elements based on a selector-type syntax. The hardest ads to remove are ones where the DOM selectors are dynamic - i.e. server-side rendering producing divs with random CSS classes.

ssalazar 10y ago
> piping assets from some arbitrary external company through my host would likely expose me to dramatically larger legal liability than the current set up. > It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML. To an end user these sounds like features, not problems. > Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve The lack of any vetting whatsoever is a big reason why adblock is so widespread. If you don't trust it enough to transmit it through your servers, why should I trust it to run on my computer?

doozy 10y ago

In Apache it takes no more than 5 lines in an .htaccess file for a full-featured setup. Look up the ProxyPass / ProxyPassReverse directives and friends.