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If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the co

If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.

dmortin 8y ago
> If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server The problem is the big guys can do this easily, but e.g. someone running a blog cannot easily serve ads from the server. Ad networks are about ad auction and showing the highest paying available ads for a site. Client side ad solutions makes this easy for the little guy, because ad selection is done on the client by the ad network. The big players (facebook, etc.) can easily alter their methods or require subscription if necessary. It's not so easy for the little guy, so a change of the current model without offering a similarly effective alternative is going to kill many little sites, blogs, forums, while the big players will keep thriving regardless.
- Kalium 8y ago
  If the small players can only continue to exist by serving malvertising, some might opine that they might not have a right to continue to exist with that business model.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Why must non-server advertising be the same as malvertising? The integration type is different from the ads that are possible. Server-side integration doesn't affect what ads are available.
    - crtasm 8y ago
      Don't all the ad networks use JavaScript? Has any network never let malicious code from advertisers slip through? (I guess Google? But I'd prefer not to have even more people embedding their js everywhere I browse)
      - dmortin 8y ago
        How is it different when ads are served from server side? Most sites (especially smaller ones) would still use an ad network, because they don't have their own resources to find advertisers, which it calls from server side to retrieve the ad. And when the retireved ad code is injected into the page on server side it could still lead to some malicious site or whatever.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I suppose it would be easier to sue such site's operator, as malware is suddenly served directly from first-party. Thus, creating a strong incentive for site operators to actually curate their ad experience, instead of subscribing to whatever network is most profitable any given day.
        dmortin 8y ago
        So this would again hurt the little guys (blogs, forums, smaller sites managed by 1 or 2 people) who don't have the capacity to find advertisers and curate ads, and for this reason, have to use an ad network. The big sites, facebook and co. can easily do some curation and find advertisers, so as it was mentioned before these changes would only eliminate the small players while further concentrating the web into the hands of the big guys.
        acdha 8y ago
        It already does. This would increase the incentive not to switch to some claiming to offer slightly higher payouts and hope that they’re not cutting corners.
        8y ago
    - Kalium 8y ago
      People who do their own server-side advertising tend to be far pickier and much more careful with what ads they use. They tend not to do instant auctions, and tend towards newspaper-style ads. Does this render them immune to malvertising? As you imply, it by no means does so. You're completely correct. It might, however, reduce the chances by a non-zero amount as compared to a third party executing arbitrary code in their client as blessed by you. But, none of that is important. I think the most important lesson here is that nobody has a right to a given business model. No website, big or small, has a fundamental right to generate revenue based on advertising. Advertising may be essential to some business models, but those business models are not essential to anything.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        > fundamental right to generate revenue based on advertising. What? Who's talking about rights here? Especially to a business model? That's a strange interpretation and companies are free to do what they want. Advertising is itself a business model, and marketing (of which advertising is a subset) is critical to the commercial success of pretty much every corporation that exists. The biggest issue with directly negotiated ad campaigns is scale. Unless you are a major publisher, no advertiser is going to spend time dealing with small buys across multiple small sites, which is the whole point of small sites using ad networks that can aggregate and streamline demand and optimize yield. Also much of that 3rd party javascript is for measurement. Digital ads require accurate metrics and the industry won't be going back to blind buys with no visibility and only the publishers promise.
        zzzcpan 8y ago
        The point of small sites using ad networks is for ad networks to make a lot of money on many small sites in aggregate. The amount of money each small site gains from this is tiny and unimportant.
        manigandham 8y ago
        That's because they're a small site. Earnings are proportional to value in traffic and audience. Small sites do not make big money.
- user812 8y ago
  The selection isn't happening on the publisher's side, but on the ad-tech side. Every publisher can enjoy the tech provided by Google, and participate in gaining money from this system, relative to it's popularity. So what we see is that small players within the ad-tech business are dying, while bigger players (Google, Facebook) can not only adapt to the law, but also help writing the law. So a hypothetical switch to first-party/server side ads won't have a negative effect on small blogs, because they can simply chose Google as their ad partner, which will create the necessary solutions. The only advantage big publishers have over small publishers is that it's easier to scale the extraction of money from 10 million visitors, compared to 10,000 visitors.
  - dmortin 8y ago
    > So a hypothetical switch to first-party/server side ads won't have a negative effect on small blogs, because they can simply chose Google as their ad partner, which will create the necessary solutions. With client side ad serving the ad serving network can be very fast, because google, etc. provides the cdn for this. If it is done on the server side then when loading the page the server will have to do additional remote network calls to retrieve the ads from google servers, so the page will be slower to respond. Also, smaller sites usually run on budget hosting which often limit resources and having to do additonal remote network fetches when assembling the page can very easily run into some server side limit. So server side ad serving for little sites can have a significant impact on server response time which is not an issue with the current model.
    - otabdeveloper2 8y ago
      It's the opposite, actually. Servers have very good and very fast network connections to other servers. Clients have very shitty network connections, especially with wi-fi or mobile devices. CDN's can help with this somewhat, but a server-to-server network connection will still always be better and faster.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
vivekseth 8y ago
How would server-side ads improve the user experience? I have some ideas about what you might mean (improve page load time, prevent content from jumping as ads load), but curious about what you think.
- dmortin 8y ago
  In case of smaller sites page load time would increase, because they still had to contact an ad network to retrieve the ads and assemble the page with ads on server side. It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.
  - swiftcoder 8y ago
    It should decrease the variance in load times. Several sites I use routinely have page load times in the low seconds for above-the-fold content, with a long-tail of up to minutes for all the ad content to finish loading (causing the page to re-layout throughout).
    - aembleton 8y ago
      That could still happen if the ads are proxied through a local ad server, so that it appears to be coming from the same domain as the content. Only difference is that they wouldn't be able to track you between sites with cookies, though they could use device fingerprinting and it would be harder for you to block.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      If the browser is waiting for it then the server would be waiting for it too. The endpoints for adexchanges are the same and wouldn't be any faster just because it's coming from a server instead.
      - vivekseth 8y ago
        I suppose ads could be cached server-side, but it would probably be more efficient to cache an ad client-side. If ads are personalized few users of a website may see the same ad, but an individual may see the same ad on different websites.
singularity2001 8y ago
> If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models I don't accept that premise (see first comment on page)
jordache 8y ago
>I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. How so? it still needs to be downloaded to the browser, and integrated with the content the use actually wants to see.
- aembleton 8y ago
  If it's not running on a separate server, then you can't eliminate just by blocking doubleclick.com or adsrv.com or some other such domain that hosts advertising. If it was hosted by the same server that produces the content, then it would be harder though not impossible to block. It would also be harder to just mass block like you can at the moment. You would need to block for individual sites by targeting the div class name that they use.
zeta0134 8y ago
As a regular user of ad-block, I am 100% in support of this model. It's a bit more work (and I expect third-party delivery server-side to be a thing) but ethically it makes a lot more sense. I think it's much harder to stand by a marketing company's invasive tracking code when your own domain has to serve it. More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to just be more effective when the site can pull them off correctly. Kotaku's deals section, for example, is consistently lovely and makes it right through my ad blocker. I'll even click it on purpose from time to time, because I value their curation and it's usually all stuff that most gamers would be interested in anyway. I don't think all advertising is bad, but the third-party iframe "drop it on the page and forget" nonsense has got to go.
- naravara 8y ago
  Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed. Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic. Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Many people who support ads imply some kind of social contract with their business model. I never signed such a thing and they can shove it up their rear end. If you make your site public I will consume it however I wish. Self hosted unobtrusive ads without tracking? Yes I will disable ublock. But it won't happen because tracking simply makes too much $€¥.

dmortin 8y ago

> If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server The problem is the big guys can do this easily, but e.g. someone running a blog cannot easily serve ads from the server. Ad networks are about ad auction and showing the highest paying available ads for a site. Client side ad solutions makes this easy for the little guy, because ad selection is done on the client by the ad network. The big players (facebook, etc.) can easily alter their methods or require subscription if necessary. It's not so easy for the little guy, so a change of the current model without offering a similarly effective alternative is going to kill many little sites, blogs, forums, while the big players will keep thriving regardless.

Kalium 8y ago
If the small players can only continue to exist by serving malvertising, some might opine that they might not have a right to continue to exist with that business model.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Why must non-server advertising be the same as malvertising? The integration type is different from the ads that are possible. Server-side integration doesn't affect what ads are available.
  - crtasm 8y ago
    Don't all the ad networks use JavaScript? Has any network never let malicious code from advertisers slip through? (I guess Google? But I'd prefer not to have even more people embedding their js everywhere I browse)
    - dmortin 8y ago
      How is it different when ads are served from server side? Most sites (especially smaller ones) would still use an ad network, because they don't have their own resources to find advertisers, which it calls from server side to retrieve the ad. And when the retireved ad code is injected into the page on server side it could still lead to some malicious site or whatever.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I suppose it would be easier to sue such site's operator, as malware is suddenly served directly from first-party. Thus, creating a strong incentive for site operators to actually curate their ad experience, instead of subscribing to whatever network is most profitable any given day.
        dmortin 8y ago
        So this would again hurt the little guys (blogs, forums, smaller sites managed by 1 or 2 people) who don't have the capacity to find advertisers and curate ads, and for this reason, have to use an ad network. The big sites, facebook and co. can easily do some curation and find advertisers, so as it was mentioned before these changes would only eliminate the small players while further concentrating the web into the hands of the big guys.
        acdha 8y ago
        It already does. This would increase the incentive not to switch to some claiming to offer slightly higher payouts and hope that they’re not cutting corners.
        8y ago
  - Kalium 8y ago
    People who do their own server-side advertising tend to be far pickier and much more careful with what ads they use. They tend not to do instant auctions, and tend towards newspaper-style ads. Does this render them immune to malvertising? As you imply, it by no means does so. You're completely correct. It might, however, reduce the chances by a non-zero amount as compared to a third party executing arbitrary code in their client as blessed by you. But, none of that is important. I think the most important lesson here is that nobody has a right to a given business model. No website, big or small, has a fundamental right to generate revenue based on advertising. Advertising may be essential to some business models, but those business models are not essential to anything.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      > fundamental right to generate revenue based on advertising. What? Who's talking about rights here? Especially to a business model? That's a strange interpretation and companies are free to do what they want. Advertising is itself a business model, and marketing (of which advertising is a subset) is critical to the commercial success of pretty much every corporation that exists. The biggest issue with directly negotiated ad campaigns is scale. Unless you are a major publisher, no advertiser is going to spend time dealing with small buys across multiple small sites, which is the whole point of small sites using ad networks that can aggregate and streamline demand and optimize yield. Also much of that 3rd party javascript is for measurement. Digital ads require accurate metrics and the industry won't be going back to blind buys with no visibility and only the publishers promise.
      - zzzcpan 8y ago
        The point of small sites using ad networks is for ad networks to make a lot of money on many small sites in aggregate. The amount of money each small site gains from this is tiny and unimportant.
        manigandham 8y ago
        That's because they're a small site. Earnings are proportional to value in traffic and audience. Small sites do not make big money.
user812 8y ago
The selection isn't happening on the publisher's side, but on the ad-tech side. Every publisher can enjoy the tech provided by Google, and participate in gaining money from this system, relative to it's popularity. So what we see is that small players within the ad-tech business are dying, while bigger players (Google, Facebook) can not only adapt to the law, but also help writing the law. So a hypothetical switch to first-party/server side ads won't have a negative effect on small blogs, because they can simply chose Google as their ad partner, which will create the necessary solutions. The only advantage big publishers have over small publishers is that it's easier to scale the extraction of money from 10 million visitors, compared to 10,000 visitors.
- dmortin 8y ago
  > So a hypothetical switch to first-party/server side ads won't have a negative effect on small blogs, because they can simply chose Google as their ad partner, which will create the necessary solutions. With client side ad serving the ad serving network can be very fast, because google, etc. provides the cdn for this. If it is done on the server side then when loading the page the server will have to do additional remote network calls to retrieve the ads from google servers, so the page will be slower to respond. Also, smaller sites usually run on budget hosting which often limit resources and having to do additonal remote network fetches when assembling the page can very easily run into some server side limit. So server side ad serving for little sites can have a significant impact on server response time which is not an issue with the current model.
  - otabdeveloper2 8y ago
    It's the opposite, actually. Servers have very good and very fast network connections to other servers. Clients have very shitty network connections, especially with wi-fi or mobile devices. CDN's can help with this somewhat, but a server-to-server network connection will still always be better and faster.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

vivekseth 8y ago

How would server-side ads improve the user experience? I have some ideas about what you might mean (improve page load time, prevent content from jumping as ads load), but curious about what you think.

dmortin 8y ago
In case of smaller sites page load time would increase, because they still had to contact an ad network to retrieve the ads and assemble the page with ads on server side. It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.
- swiftcoder 8y ago
  It should decrease the variance in load times. Several sites I use routinely have page load times in the low seconds for above-the-fold content, with a long-tail of up to minutes for all the ad content to finish loading (causing the page to re-layout throughout).
  - aembleton 8y ago
    That could still happen if the ads are proxied through a local ad server, so that it appears to be coming from the same domain as the content. Only difference is that they wouldn't be able to track you between sites with cookies, though they could use device fingerprinting and it would be harder for you to block.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    If the browser is waiting for it then the server would be waiting for it too. The endpoints for adexchanges are the same and wouldn't be any faster just because it's coming from a server instead.
    - vivekseth 8y ago
      I suppose ads could be cached server-side, but it would probably be more efficient to cache an ad client-side. If ads are personalized few users of a website may see the same ad, but an individual may see the same ad on different websites.

singularity2001 8y ago

> If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models I don't accept that premise (see first comment on page)

jordache 8y ago

>I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. How so? it still needs to be downloaded to the browser, and integrated with the content the use actually wants to see.

aembleton 8y ago
If it's not running on a separate server, then you can't eliminate just by blocking doubleclick.com or adsrv.com or some other such domain that hosts advertising. If it was hosted by the same server that produces the content, then it would be harder though not impossible to block. It would also be harder to just mass block like you can at the moment. You would need to block for individual sites by targeting the div class name that they use.

zeta0134 8y ago

As a regular user of ad-block, I am 100% in support of this model. It's a bit more work (and I expect third-party delivery server-side to be a thing) but ethically it makes a lot more sense. I think it's much harder to stand by a marketing company's invasive tracking code when your own domain has to serve it. More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to just be more effective when the site can pull them off correctly. Kotaku's deals section, for example, is consistently lovely and makes it right through my ad blocker. I'll even click it on purpose from time to time, because I value their curation and it's usually all stuff that most gamers would be interested in anyway. I don't think all advertising is bad, but the third-party iframe "drop it on the page and forget" nonsense has got to go.

naravara 8y ago
Daring Fireball does a great job of integrating ads into the page. Gruber sells a small banner in the corner, which is basically the only part of his page with any color in it so it really stand out. Then he has a weekly sponsor post where he plugs that week's sponsors. He also has an individual sponsor for his RSS feed where he puts an article plugging them into the RSS feed. Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic. Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Many people who support ads imply some kind of social contract with their business model. I never signed such a thing and they can shove it up their rear end. If you make your site public I will consume it however I wish. Self hosted unobtrusive ads without tracking? Yes I will disable ublock. But it won't happen because tracking simply makes too much $€¥.