7 ms·

From a technical standpoint, I don't understand why the adtech companies don't just serve ads via APIs consumed by website owners, and served to clients via the

From a technical standpoint, I don't understand why the adtech companies don't just serve ads via APIs consumed by website owners, and served to clients via the primary domain. This seems like it would obviate current adblocking and third-party cookie blockers. It would add a bit of technical complexity for site owners, but that seems manageable, particularly for b2b relationships. Obviously, I hope this doesn't happen, but it seems like an obvious strategy and I don't see the flaw.

Ilverin 7y ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/
- cproctor 7y ago
  Hmm, good point. Though it's not like we're headed in a particularly appealing direction as it is...
ar-nelson 7y ago
In the same vein: I've never seen a video site that tried to defeat adblockers by inserting ads directly into the video stream. It seems like an obvious tactic; it could even use JS to prevent fast-forwarding the ads, and that would be a difficult thing for adblockers to detect and remove. The main problem I can see is that you would have to choose between CDN caching and targeted ads. If the video was uniquely generated for each user with new targeted ads, it couldn't be cached. I know that some podcasts use a technique like this, modifying the audio stream at download time to insert recent ads, even if the podcast being downloaded is old.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, the reason the YouTube app ads can't be blocked even with something like Pi-hole, is that they do exactly what you're talking about.
  - CraneWorm 7y ago
    I have never seen an ad on YouTube that was not put there by the channel owner "this video is sponsored by PushStuff".
    - kgwxd 7y ago
      Do you use the YouTube app or the website?
      - CraneWorm 7y ago
        Good question! I forgot there is an app. I suppose it's much more a hassle to get rid of the ads from the app.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  That does exist, it’s called server-side ad injection (more like cancer injection).
- comex 7y ago
  Twitch recently started doing something like that, albeit by manipulating the HLS playlist rather than the video files themselves: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357 https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357
rsync 7y ago
"From a technical standpoint, I don't understand why the adtech companies don't just serve ads via APIs consumed by website owners, and served to clients via the primary domain." I also would like to know why there is so much resistance to this, which was the original model of ads on websites ... rsync.net stopped advertising, in all venues, about two years ago - mainly because the overlap between "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker" is basically zero. Nobody who cares about our product ever saw our ads. But, of course, we still have some interest in advertising our product and, to that end, I have approached several websites and offered very good money to just insert two lines of plain text on their HTML page. No "network", no code blob, nothing interactive ... no picture ... just an extra line of text, with a bit of it href'd for a link. Huge pushback on that. No interest. "Impossible". I really don't understand the responses I've gotten ...
- tialaramex 7y ago
  As an example, from LWN.net's FAQ under Advertising "What happened to text ads? The text ad facility allowed readers to place simple, text-oriented ads on the site. Use of this facility had been dropping over time; when we realized that nobody had bought an ad in over six months, we decided to remove the feature." LWN would still sell you banner advertising, but they don't do text any more. As with other features that were killed because nobody used them, the interest of a single small buyer won't bring them back because it doesn't make any economic sense.
  - rsync 7y ago
    That's very interesting that you used that example because LWN.net was one of the content providers that we approached. I figured someone at their organization had the wherewithal to open a regular file in vi and paste in two lines of HTML ... in exchange for money ... Nope.
- manfredo 7y ago
  If ad-blocking really takes off I expect this to become the norm. It is technically more complicated than just adding adding an adwords element to a web page or something like that, but I do think it'd be considerably more resilient to ad-blocking. I once had the idea of delivering ads by dynamically injecting them into a video stream. As in, when you load a youtube video it prepends the ad into the same video stream as the main content. Ideally the transition from ad to main content is between key frames so that the ad-blocking software can't fully strip out the ad without screwing with the stream itself.
yonkshi 7y ago
My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website. The cost of potentially blocked by ad blockers is finite (A percentage of total revenue), but the cost of ad-fraud is not bounded.
- callmeal 7y ago
  >My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website. Isn't the solution to that problem a flat rate fee (similar to how advertisements on tv, newspapers and magazines work)? Instead of a pay-per-click it could be a simple $X dollars and your ad will be visible for Y days/weeks.
  - uponcoffee 7y ago
    I don't see how that would work. If my site gets zero traffic, would I still get paid a flat rate to 'serve' ads? Pay per impression/click works to pay proportionally to individual site traffic and the extent of a campaign. The current solution is effectively a flat rate as far as an ad campaign is concerned: impressions/$
    - michaelt 7y ago
      People would either (a) pay to place ads on sites they knew had a decent amount of traffic just from reputation, or (b) would hire ad-buying companies which made it their business to know what different sites' ad space is worth. Needless to say, this could be inconvenient for the adwords-make-me-five-bucks-a-month scale sites. It'd work out OK for the New York Times-es of the world though.
- amelius 7y ago
  What would happen if browsers simply didn't allow cross domain referencing? Would the web break (and would it be worse than NoScript)?
  - 7y ago
Awaythrow21 7y ago
That is what yandex does, but unofficially.
iooi 7y ago
This is coming. There's already a couple of startups doing this. A lot of them operate in "stealth" so they don't attract the attention of ad blockers. There's no API needed, all they require is for the website to set up a CNAME record. They're usually random and rotated often. If you're familiar with the current arms race in ad fraud, there's a coming arms race for ad blocking.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Indeed. This is one of the reasons why I recently realized that I can actually see the day coming when I won't be using the web anymore. That was a weird realization that only a couple of years ago would have been unthinkable for me.
- cproctor 7y ago
  Right--it could work at the DNS level. Yuck.
laughinghan 7y ago
> This seems like it would obviate [...] third-party cookie blockers. Wouldn't this do the exact opposite? Ads that did this wouldn't be able to track clients across different domains, even for clients that allow third-party cookies. But I think the main issue is the jump in technical complexity, which is more than "a bit"—many, many websites are built by non-coders who can copy and paste a bit of HTML & CSS, perhaps using a CMS or blogging tool like WordPress or Moveable Type, and who can paste in a script tag, but no way could they write even the 3 lines of PHP it would take to reverse proxy for an ad script. Maybe if this approach became popular enough, there would be a standard WordPress plugin or something, but what adtech company would want to be the first to require it?
taneq 7y ago
It makes it WAY too easy to generate fake clicks/views.
chopin 7y ago
I block third-party Javascript quite aggressively (for fear of malware). I am much less strict for first-party JS. If this becomes the norm I'd block first-party just like third-party. As well, obviously the owner of the website becomes directly responsible for malware served through an ad network. Finally, advertisers prefer third-party to fight ad fraud (by the site owner).

Ilverin 7y ago

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/

cproctor 7y ago
Hmm, good point. Though it's not like we're headed in a particularly appealing direction as it is...

ar-nelson 7y ago

In the same vein: I've never seen a video site that tried to defeat adblockers by inserting ads directly into the video stream. It seems like an obvious tactic; it could even use JS to prevent fast-forwarding the ads, and that would be a difficult thing for adblockers to detect and remove. The main problem I can see is that you would have to choose between CDN caching and targeted ads. If the video was uniquely generated for each user with new targeted ads, it couldn't be cached. I know that some podcasts use a technique like this, modifying the audio stream at download time to insert recent ads, even if the podcast being downloaded is old.

kgwxd 7y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the reason the YouTube app ads can't be blocked even with something like Pi-hole, is that they do exactly what you're talking about.
- CraneWorm 7y ago
  I have never seen an ad on YouTube that was not put there by the channel owner "this video is sponsored by PushStuff".
  - kgwxd 7y ago
    Do you use the YouTube app or the website?
    - CraneWorm 7y ago
      Good question! I forgot there is an app. I suppose it's much more a hassle to get rid of the ads from the app.
Nextgrid 7y ago
That does exist, it’s called server-side ad injection (more like cancer injection).
comex 7y ago
Twitch recently started doing something like that, albeit by manipulating the HLS playlist rather than the video files themselves: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357 https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/2357

rsync 7y ago

"From a technical standpoint, I don't understand why the adtech companies don't just serve ads via APIs consumed by website owners, and served to clients via the primary domain." I also would like to know why there is so much resistance to this, which was the original model of ads on websites ... rsync.net stopped advertising, in all venues, about two years ago - mainly because the overlap between "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker" is basically zero. Nobody who cares about our product ever saw our ads. But, of course, we still have some interest in advertising our product and, to that end, I have approached several websites and offered very good money to just insert two lines of plain text on their HTML page. No "network", no code blob, nothing interactive ... no picture ... just an extra line of text, with a bit of it href'd for a link. Huge pushback on that. No interest. "Impossible". I really don't understand the responses I've gotten ...

tialaramex 7y ago
As an example, from LWN.net's FAQ under Advertising "What happened to text ads? The text ad facility allowed readers to place simple, text-oriented ads on the site. Use of this facility had been dropping over time; when we realized that nobody had bought an ad in over six months, we decided to remove the feature." LWN would still sell you banner advertising, but they don't do text any more. As with other features that were killed because nobody used them, the interest of a single small buyer won't bring them back because it doesn't make any economic sense.
- rsync 7y ago
  That's very interesting that you used that example because LWN.net was one of the content providers that we approached. I figured someone at their organization had the wherewithal to open a regular file in vi and paste in two lines of HTML ... in exchange for money ... Nope.
manfredo 7y ago
If ad-blocking really takes off I expect this to become the norm. It is technically more complicated than just adding adding an adwords element to a web page or something like that, but I do think it'd be considerably more resilient to ad-blocking. I once had the idea of delivering ads by dynamically injecting them into a video stream. As in, when you load a youtube video it prepends the ad into the same video stream as the main content. Ideally the transition from ad to main content is between key frames so that the ad-blocking software can't fully strip out the ad without screwing with the stream itself.

yonkshi 7y ago

My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website. The cost of potentially blocked by ad blockers is finite (A percentage of total revenue), but the cost of ad-fraud is not bounded.

callmeal 7y ago
>My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website. Isn't the solution to that problem a flat rate fee (similar to how advertisements on tv, newspapers and magazines work)? Instead of a pay-per-click it could be a simple $X dollars and your ad will be visible for Y days/weeks.
- uponcoffee 7y ago
  I don't see how that would work. If my site gets zero traffic, would I still get paid a flat rate to 'serve' ads? Pay per impression/click works to pay proportionally to individual site traffic and the extent of a campaign. The current solution is effectively a flat rate as far as an ad campaign is concerned: impressions/$
  - michaelt 7y ago
    People would either (a) pay to place ads on sites they knew had a decent amount of traffic just from reputation, or (b) would hire ad-buying companies which made it their business to know what different sites' ad space is worth. Needless to say, this could be inconvenient for the adwords-make-me-five-bucks-a-month scale sites. It'd work out OK for the New York Times-es of the world though.
amelius 7y ago
What would happen if browsers simply didn't allow cross domain referencing? Would the web break (and would it be worse than NoScript)?
- 7y ago

Awaythrow21 7y ago

That is what yandex does, but unofficially.

iooi 7y ago

This is coming. There's already a couple of startups doing this. A lot of them operate in "stealth" so they don't attract the attention of ad blockers. There's no API needed, all they require is for the website to set up a CNAME record. They're usually random and rotated often. If you're familiar with the current arms race in ad fraud, there's a coming arms race for ad blocking.

JohnFen 7y ago
Indeed. This is one of the reasons why I recently realized that I can actually see the day coming when I won't be using the web anymore. That was a weird realization that only a couple of years ago would have been unthinkable for me.
cproctor 7y ago
Right--it could work at the DNS level. Yuck.

laughinghan 7y ago

> This seems like it would obviate [...] third-party cookie blockers. Wouldn't this do the exact opposite? Ads that did this wouldn't be able to track clients across different domains, even for clients that allow third-party cookies. But I think the main issue is the jump in technical complexity, which is more than "a bit"—many, many websites are built by non-coders who can copy and paste a bit of HTML & CSS, perhaps using a CMS or blogging tool like WordPress or Moveable Type, and who can paste in a script tag, but no way could they write even the 3 lines of PHP it would take to reverse proxy for an ad script. Maybe if this approach became popular enough, there would be a standard WordPress plugin or something, but what adtech company would want to be the first to require it?

taneq 7y ago

It makes it WAY too easy to generate fake clicks/views.

chopin 7y ago

I block third-party Javascript quite aggressively (for fear of malware). I am much less strict for first-party JS. If this becomes the norm I'd block first-party just like third-party. As well, obviously the owner of the website becomes directly responsible for malware served through an ad network. Finally, advertisers prefer third-party to fight ad fraud (by the site owner).