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I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same
by Houshalter 9y ago
I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way.
But that only defeats simple adblocks that blacklist domains. It's theoretically possible to make an adblock that detects ads through machine learning and removes them. Doesn't matter where they are hosted.
But advertisers can run scripts to detect modifying the web page and stop it. So adblock would have to move to having a headless browser that renders the page, and then copies it and removes the ads.
Then the advertisers would have to try to trick the machine learning itself. Adversarial machine learning is a thing, with neural networks trained to fool other neural networks. And images that are highly optimized to exploit subtle defects in other neural networks.
As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable.
- StephenConnell 9y agoLike popular music lyrics dropping brand names...
- kasey_junk 9y ago> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. Or at least route it through their servers. The ads then get served through the same domain and can't be blocked that way. This is already happening. Further, embedding paid for content in the middle of original content at the server side is also already happening. > As ML ad detection improves, the only way for ads to get past it will be to make ads that look more and more like real content, even to the human eye. Perhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable. This is also already happening. Brand placement deals are nothing new to advertising and they are basically table stakes to most content purveyors. The real question isn't if those things are going to happen, its how those sorts of deals will handle the analytics side of the equation. How will you prove that your instagram feed is the best place for the yoga pants provider to spend their marketing budget?
- cpeterso 9y agoGoogle AMP content and Facebook Instant Articles are served from Google's and Facebook's servers now. "Served" is not quite the same as "hosted" but it's close.
- a_imho 9y agoPerhaps in the limit, ads and content will become completely indistinguishable. I don't know whether this is a deliberate reference, but there is South Park episode playing with this idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_%28South_Park%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_%28South_Par...
- felipeerias 9y ago> I wonder if eventually ad companies will just host the content themselves. They are already doing it: Google AMP, Facebook Instant Pages.
- intenscia 9y agoWe are already doing this on our sites. We run a whitelist of ads, and when we encounter Adblock we just serve an image tag and HREF with no JS. Works well for us and the user.