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> Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and

by jefftk 7y ago

> Maybe a new <ad /> tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself.)

deanclatworthy 7y ago
Good point. I guess it’d kill PPC. I’m not sure how advertisers detect fraud but maybe you can check the limited info sent along with the request and do whatever heuristics you do as usual.
jrimbault 7y ago
You don't ? And you get paid less by click but you also have more clicks ? (also cf NYT) This way you also avoid the arms race between ad networks, ad blockers and clickbot farms.
wybiral 7y ago
You can make the same argument about podcasts, television, radio, magazines, billboards, etc. At some point you rely on statistics that someone is giving you in all of those mediums but they still made money. I've personally made much more money producing content (YouTube and podcasts) by directly working with brands than I ever have from Adsense anyway so I'm not convinced that the advertisers "paying more" is helping content creators much to begin with. Patreon seems to be a symptom of that. Edit: Also, on the subject of advertisers paying less. Isn't part of the problem the fact that adtech giants like Google are saying "look, we have this awesome tracking and targeting tech so you can pay less for ads to reach your target audience". Thus reducing the potential ad money that those people would pay into potential revenue for content creators to reach their audience?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Patron seems to be a symptom of that Wouldn't Patreon be more an indicator of said symptopms? I hate English sometimes, and its my native language.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
lstamour 7y ago
It seems to me that the problem is entirely of the web advertiser’s making, though. When the web was new and novel, tracking was used to prove or validate specific ad spend. You can still do that sort of comparative analysis but now detection might have to live on and be limited to what can be detected from the advertiser’s own site. And if by the nature of the product or sale, it proves impossible to tell if I’m a human, well, that will be a shared cost or concern that all advertisers would have. If sites were forced to or mandated this new form of anti-tracking ad, advertisers would eventually go along with it because the alternative is not advertising on the large percentage of sites which have adopted it. This would probably make non-web ads and validated human email addresses more valuable unless they too are subject to the same anti-tracking provisions. An email service (or search service) by it’s nature offers more opportunities to tell if you’re human though, and such services would be inherently more profitable to advertise on... (see Facebook profits) I don’t really see problems here outside of encouraging an entire industry to move on from tracking and/or DRM the way an entire nascent industry moved on from the popup and pop-under ad, or invasive screen takeover and annoying animated ads.
dec0dedab0de 7y ago
You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. Or just charge flat rates.
- jefftk 7y ago
  >You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. That massively increases the barrier to entry. Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. No one involved needs to trust you (much) since the ad network is in a good position to detect cheating. Remove that, and big trusted publishers (NYT, FB, Google) are still fine, but smaller ones wouldn't be able to demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted. > Or just charge flat rates. Adverse selection will kill you.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    Yes. Arguing that online advertising should be like traditional advertising (killing the adtech industry of today) means accepting that a ton of money will flow from small players to the bigger players, and into more insidious forms of ads (video overlays, native ads posing as news). But it’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to accept.
  - wybiral 7y ago
    > Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. With the tiny payout you get from Adsense, unless your site is really popular to begin with, you're not going to make much of anything. Pennies maybe (which you won't receive until hitting a threshold anyway). So I don't see how it helps with entry. By the time your service is popular enough to make real money you could approach smaller brands and advertisers to get better deals than Adsense. Adsense exists to make ads cheaper for the advertisers and there's no way around the fact that that means content producers will be making less money as a whole. You can't have it both ways. It's lowering the amount that advertisers are willing to pay content creators by giving them the perception that their money stretches further, aided by online tracking and targeting. Meanwhile Google caches in on their cut of the deal and all of the piles of data they collect with their monopoly while content producers get shafted.
jacobobryant 7y ago
I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model. Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Google's wellbeing. :) I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs. It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
  - jacobobryant 7y ago
    True, but in many cases you can still offer a service for free without ads. E.g. offer a free version with limited functionality, and then offer a paid version with features that are needed mainly by people who use your product for work. Even if ads weren't an option, it's still advantageous to get lots of people using your product, and I think companies will continue to find ways to do so.
  - tomrod 7y ago
    But they can afford LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Vimeo. The current allocation of human productivity enablement is not the only one possible (and an "is" is not an "ought to be" as per Hume).
    - Godel_unicode 7y ago
      You need a computer to run LibreOffice. So no, in many cases, they can't afford it. Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content. Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.
tinus_hn 7y ago
So there’s the choice. Get more money and get blocked, or get less money and do not get blocked.
c256 7y ago
Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis. Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”
- Nebasuke 7y ago
  I think one big difference with DRM for PC games, is that piracy of PC games is normally not a money making activity for the pirates. It might prevent companies from selling a game to certain people, but there is no clear cut evidence that person would have otherwise bought it. For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermore, pirates can even profit from it by having a website and generating fake clicks for that website. If you would not try to prevent this ad fraud you would have bad actors siphoning off complete company advertising budgets to their accounts.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    You don’t have to use a model which allows this. Pay-per-placement, for example. You pay a fixed amount to put your ad in a specific article (or on the entire site or in whatever rotation people like) and then there’s no way to rip off advertisers with click farms. You still need to measure your audience to get advertisers to pay the price, but this is decoupled from the individual ad buys so it can be done differently.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Ha, please have a little trip to any of the open air electronic markets of Eastern Europe(even of those countries that are within the EU) and every other stall has DVDs of almost any PC game/software you can think of. Signs like "newest game releases here!", "Windows 10 all versions no key one dvd!", "Blu-ray movies - 10 per disc!" Are still common. They are not even trying to hide this even though the police are meant to be on a look out for that stuff, but I can guarantee that I could come back with a backpack absolutely full of pirated PC games from one of these markets - that is making people money, no one is doing this out of charity even if prices are low.
tomrod 7y ago
It wouldn't, so targeted ads should be de-emphasized in a human-centric model.
dkersten 7y ago
Honestly, I don’t care. It worked in print, it can work in digital. Adverts would bother me less if advertisers hadn’t proven again and again that they can’t be trusted and that they don’t care about my privacy. I also believe that advertisement is a cop out for a real business model and the lowest form of business. Besides, as Banksy said: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” And before you say that the content creators need to get paid, just looks at the situation on Youtube, where Google makes a fortune and the content creators make fuck all, and big companies can take what little ad revenue the creators would have got for copyright claiming over 5 seconds of audio that falls under fair use. Many content creators now rely either on sponsorship or direct support through things like Patreon. Sorry, but Google can go suck it. (I’ve also started just not consuming content from hostile sites. It’s mostly trash anyway.)
- okr 7y ago
  You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it. And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i dont have to pay a dime. And that they are still able to make it a platform, where i get a lot of interesting things to see. And it is somehow sustainable.
  - baddox 7y ago
    > then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.
    - 18pfsmt 7y ago
cbluth 7y ago
Consumer: im blocking all ads for reason x Advertiser: dont block my ads because the business depends on it Consumer: here's a solution that works for me Advertiser: but then that solution doesn't work for me Consumer: i don't care, im still blocking all ads until I feel like i don't have to
- majewsky 7y ago
  Consumer: I block ads for reason X. Publisher: Don't block ads or I will go out of business. Consumer: Then please allow me to contribute in some other way (subscription, Patreon, microtransactions). Publisher: Hm, I dunno, that sounds like work.
  - mishu2 7y ago
    I'm seeing more and more articles about online ads popping up. I also use an ad blocker (unlock origin on mobile, umatrix on desktop) for all my browsing just to make it bearable. But I also see a lot of people saying they'd like to contribute to the sites they visit frequently. I built a proof of concept website to let everyone do just that: https://www.propup.net https://www.propup.net There are several similar concepts (Mozilla with Scroll, quid, even patreon et al), but I think mine reduces friction because signing up is as easy as on HN. Oh, and there's absolutely no tracking or selling of information to third parties. Any feedback is welcome.
pvg 7y ago
These are all interesting questions for advertisers but it's not obvious the burden of addressing advertisers' problems should be dumped on users with next to no informed consent, as is the case now.
michaelmrose 7y ago
Your industry doesn't itself create value it maximizes the value of other industries by connecting customers and creators. The ultimate equilibrium might see your industry having to do more with less. Ultimately the world did everything it does now without internet marketing and ultimately could do so again. A sizable share of a smaller pie is better than all of nothing. Essentially your concern is both correct and irrelevant. Nobody cares if Google has to make less money to have a less crappy internet the same way nobody cares if the newspaper industry makes less money.
Ntrails 7y ago
How does fraud detection work on newspaper sales figures, or television viewer numbers? The internet has seemingly decided that without tracking ads don't work. No. Serve your static ad or I will continue to see nothing. :)
- manigandham 7y ago
  There are rating agencies that verify both print and TV numbers with as much accuracy as possible, and Connected TV (streaming, smart tvs, netflix, etc) now have comparable metrics to website ads. Those older mediums were also just inefficient and create a lot of wasted spend, whereas the internet has allowed far more businesses to start and thrive by lowering their customer acquisition costs. These companies would never survive if they had to still rely on older ad models.
alkonaut 7y ago
> advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less I think people like me who argue that web advertising should return to dumb/static/contextual ads also accept that it might kill a huge fraction of web revenue/jobs/content. The downside is that advertisers move to the walled gardens of a few big players, and to native advertising. I’m still more ok with that than with the way the ad industry works now.
Silhouette 7y ago
How would fraud detection work in this model? Honest but blunt answer: We (my businesses acting as advertisers) don't rely on your (Google's, or any other ad network's) claims anyway. The only thing that matters is the metrics we measure on our own sites, and we're going to be able to separate those by ad campaign anyway. We don't care about getting more Facebook likes or how many Instagram views some image gets or how many impressions Google claims to have shown on third party sites. We only care whether a given campaign gave a good return on investment in terms of direct benefits and/or actionable leads.
- jefftk 7y ago
  I used to work at an advertising company that worked this way, doing lead gen. In some verticals there's nothing better, and as long as your own metrics are good you can figure out how much a traffic source is worth. If a traffic source goes bad and starts being 50% spam, no problem, your automatic system lowers its bids by 50% and you're fine. The thing is, only a very small fraction of the ads ecosystem works this way. Coke wants to show ads to people to position their brand, not to get people to buy soda over the internet, which means they're not able to measure the efficacy of channels on a per-publisher basis and figure out if they're being cheated. Brand advertisers typically use third-party fraud detection services like Moat to inspect the environment their ads are running in and see if they look legitimate. Then there's a large range of people doing things where you could measure the effect of channels, but the site just isn't that sophisticated. Some pizza place somewhere buys some ads, they don't have the tech staff to measure conversions and optimize their channels, instead they trust the ad network to make sure they're not being cheated. Even sophisticated performance advertisers rely on ad network fraud detection, just indirectly. Yes, you run your ad campaign, and you bid what the traffic is worth to you based on your measurements. But the existence of that traffic stream comes from fraud detection. Imagine some publishers on an ad network start spamming it, and the ad network isn't able to detect the fraud. The money from advertisers now isn't going to publishers in proportion to the value of their traffic, but instead in proportion to how much they're cheating. The publishers that were the source of your good traffic go out of business, and the ad network collapses because it doesn't have valuable traffic to send to anyone.
JoshTriplett 7y ago
> How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Leaving aside that this isn't the problem of end users: Link to a site, use an ID for that campaign (analogous to an affiliate ID), and don't pay unless a purchase takes place. Bots can't fake that.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  Except many ads are not directly linkable to purchases. Coca Cola won't track you to a local grocery store and an ad for a musical won't track you when you buy the ticket a week later.
  - mlguy456 7y ago
    It depends. Your credit card company knows what you bought and when, while the ad network knows the phone number linked to the PC where the ad was shown. Join the two tables and we can track you to the grocery store.
    - danielscrubs 7y ago
      Do they though? They do know where and how much, but the cashiers commonly put in an amount manually into the credit card device.
    - yoz-y 7y ago
      Even if this were done (I don’t think that either of the involved companies would or could share this detail of data) you still have a problem. What about ads that don’t work? I have put an ad on your site, it took up space for some time. The ad was bad and nobody bought anything even though a hundred thousand people saw it. The publisher is still owed money because they did their part.
justforyou 7y ago
There's not really any meaningful empirical proof of ad impressions now, just a very shady chain of trust between a handfull of companies who all have a vested interest in not scrutinizing these things too closely. Once you're at the point where you are buying traffic to meet goals, you're not going to scrutinize the origin of that traffic beyone anything that would appear to be flagrant fraud to your customers.
skunkpocalypse 7y ago
> How would fraud detection work in this model? Your business model is not our problem.
gsich 7y ago
How do they know if it's a bot?
rhizome 7y ago
>How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Maybe the dominant adops model was a mistake? To throw back to an older, simpler time: what would thinking outside the box look like for this?

by jefftk 7y ago

deanclatworthy 7y ago

Good point. I guess it’d kill PPC. I’m not sure how advertisers detect fraud but maybe you can check the limited info sent along with the request and do whatever heuristics you do as usual.

jrimbault 7y ago

You don't ? And you get paid less by click but you also have more clicks ? (also cf NYT) This way you also avoid the arms race between ad networks, ad blockers and clickbot farms.

wybiral 7y ago

You can make the same argument about podcasts, television, radio, magazines, billboards, etc. At some point you rely on statistics that someone is giving you in all of those mediums but they still made money. I've personally made much more money producing content (YouTube and podcasts) by directly working with brands than I ever have from Adsense anyway so I'm not convinced that the advertisers "paying more" is helping content creators much to begin with. Patreon seems to be a symptom of that. Edit: Also, on the subject of advertisers paying less. Isn't part of the problem the fact that adtech giants like Google are saying "look, we have this awesome tracking and targeting tech so you can pay less for ads to reach your target audience". Thus reducing the potential ad money that those people would pay into potential revenue for content creators to reach their audience?

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Patron seems to be a symptom of that Wouldn't Patreon be more an indicator of said symptopms? I hate English sometimes, and its my native language.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

lstamour 7y ago

It seems to me that the problem is entirely of the web advertiser’s making, though. When the web was new and novel, tracking was used to prove or validate specific ad spend. You can still do that sort of comparative analysis but now detection might have to live on and be limited to what can be detected from the advertiser’s own site. And if by the nature of the product or sale, it proves impossible to tell if I’m a human, well, that will be a shared cost or concern that all advertisers would have. If sites were forced to or mandated this new form of anti-tracking ad, advertisers would eventually go along with it because the alternative is not advertising on the large percentage of sites which have adopted it. This would probably make non-web ads and validated human email addresses more valuable unless they too are subject to the same anti-tracking provisions. An email service (or search service) by it’s nature offers more opportunities to tell if you’re human though, and such services would be inherently more profitable to advertise on... (see Facebook profits) I don’t really see problems here outside of encouraging an entire industry to move on from tracking and/or DRM the way an entire nascent industry moved on from the popup and pop-under ad, or invasive screen takeover and annoying animated ads.

dec0dedab0de 7y ago

You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. Or just charge flat rates.

jefftk 7y ago
>You would only do business with companies you trust to not cheat. That massively increases the barrier to entry. Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. No one involved needs to trust you (much) since the ad network is in a good position to detect cheating. Remove that, and big trusted publishers (NYT, FB, Google) are still fine, but smaller ones wouldn't be able to demonstrate to the ad network or advertiser that they should be trusted. > Or just charge flat rates. Adverse selection will kill you.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Yes. Arguing that online advertising should be like traditional advertising (killing the adtech industry of today) means accepting that a ton of money will flow from small players to the bigger players, and into more insidious forms of ads (video overlays, native ads posing as news). But it’s a tradeoff I’m more than happy to accept.
- wybiral 7y ago
  > Right now you can make a new site, sign up with an ad network, and start showing ads. With the tiny payout you get from Adsense, unless your site is really popular to begin with, you're not going to make much of anything. Pennies maybe (which you won't receive until hitting a threshold anyway). So I don't see how it helps with entry. By the time your service is popular enough to make real money you could approach smaller brands and advertisers to get better deals than Adsense. Adsense exists to make ads cheaper for the advertisers and there's no way around the fact that that means content producers will be making less money as a whole. You can't have it both ways. It's lowering the amount that advertisers are willing to pay content creators by giving them the perception that their money stretches further, aided by online tracking and targeting. Meanwhile Google caches in on their cut of the deal and all of the piles of data they collect with their monopoly while content producers get shafted.

jacobobryant 7y ago

I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model. Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Google's wellbeing. :) I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this since you work on ads: are ads actually essential in the software industry, or could we do just fine without them?

Godel_unicode 7y ago
I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs. It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very carefully before we remove services they need.
- jacobobryant 7y ago
  True, but in many cases you can still offer a service for free without ads. E.g. offer a free version with limited functionality, and then offer a paid version with features that are needed mainly by people who use your product for work. Even if ads weren't an option, it's still advantageous to get lots of people using your product, and I think companies will continue to find ways to do so.
- tomrod 7y ago
  But they can afford LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Vimeo. The current allocation of human productivity enablement is not the only one possible (and an "is" is not an "ought to be" as per Hume).
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    You need a computer to run LibreOffice. So no, in many cases, they can't afford it. Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content. Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.

tinus_hn 7y ago

So there’s the choice. Get more money and get blocked, or get less money and do not get blocked.

c256 7y ago

Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis. Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”

Nebasuke 7y ago
I think one big difference with DRM for PC games, is that piracy of PC games is normally not a money making activity for the pirates. It might prevent companies from selling a game to certain people, but there is no clear cut evidence that person would have otherwise bought it. For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermore, pirates can even profit from it by having a website and generating fake clicks for that website. If you would not try to prevent this ad fraud you would have bad actors siphoning off complete company advertising budgets to their accounts.
- mikeash 7y ago
  You don’t have to use a model which allows this. Pay-per-placement, for example. You pay a fixed amount to put your ad in a specific article (or on the entire site or in whatever rotation people like) and then there’s no way to rip off advertisers with click farms. You still need to measure your audience to get advertisers to pay the price, but this is decoupled from the individual ad buys so it can be done differently.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Ha, please have a little trip to any of the open air electronic markets of Eastern Europe(even of those countries that are within the EU) and every other stall has DVDs of almost any PC game/software you can think of. Signs like "newest game releases here!", "Windows 10 all versions no key one dvd!", "Blu-ray movies - 10 per disc!" Are still common. They are not even trying to hide this even though the police are meant to be on a look out for that stuff, but I can guarantee that I could come back with a backpack absolutely full of pirated PC games from one of these markets - that is making people money, no one is doing this out of charity even if prices are low.

tomrod 7y ago

It wouldn't, so targeted ads should be de-emphasized in a human-centric model.

dkersten 7y ago

Honestly, I don’t care. It worked in print, it can work in digital. Adverts would bother me less if advertisers hadn’t proven again and again that they can’t be trusted and that they don’t care about my privacy. I also believe that advertisement is a cop out for a real business model and the lowest form of business. Besides, as Banksy said: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” And before you say that the content creators need to get paid, just looks at the situation on Youtube, where Google makes a fortune and the content creators make fuck all, and big companies can take what little ad revenue the creators would have got for copyright claiming over 5 seconds of audio that falls under fair use. Many content creators now rely either on sponsorship or direct support through things like Patreon. Sorry, but Google can go suck it. (I’ve also started just not consuming content from hostile sites. It’s mostly trash anyway.)

okr 7y ago
You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it. And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i dont have to pay a dime. And that they are still able to make it a platform, where i get a lot of interesting things to see. And it is somehow sustainable.
- baddox 7y ago
  > then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all. Why do websites exist that don’t have ads? Why do people have personal websites and blogs? Perhaps it is, in fact, physically possible for a website to exist without serving third-party JavaScript ads.
  - 18pfsmt 7y ago

cbluth 7y ago

Consumer: im blocking all ads for reason x Advertiser: dont block my ads because the business depends on it Consumer: here's a solution that works for me Advertiser: but then that solution doesn't work for me Consumer: i don't care, im still blocking all ads until I feel like i don't have to

majewsky 7y ago
Consumer: I block ads for reason X. Publisher: Don't block ads or I will go out of business. Consumer: Then please allow me to contribute in some other way (subscription, Patreon, microtransactions). Publisher: Hm, I dunno, that sounds like work.
- mishu2 7y ago
  I'm seeing more and more articles about online ads popping up. I also use an ad blocker (unlock origin on mobile, umatrix on desktop) for all my browsing just to make it bearable. But I also see a lot of people saying they'd like to contribute to the sites they visit frequently. I built a proof of concept website to let everyone do just that: https://www.propup.net https://www.propup.net There are several similar concepts (Mozilla with Scroll, quid, even patreon et al), but I think mine reduces friction because signing up is as easy as on HN. Oh, and there's absolutely no tracking or selling of information to third parties. Any feedback is welcome.

pvg 7y ago

These are all interesting questions for advertisers but it's not obvious the burden of addressing advertisers' problems should be dumped on users with next to no informed consent, as is the case now.

michaelmrose 7y ago

Your industry doesn't itself create value it maximizes the value of other industries by connecting customers and creators. The ultimate equilibrium might see your industry having to do more with less. Ultimately the world did everything it does now without internet marketing and ultimately could do so again. A sizable share of a smaller pie is better than all of nothing. Essentially your concern is both correct and irrelevant. Nobody cares if Google has to make less money to have a less crappy internet the same way nobody cares if the newspaper industry makes less money.

Ntrails 7y ago

How does fraud detection work on newspaper sales figures, or television viewer numbers? The internet has seemingly decided that without tracking ads don't work. No. Serve your static ad or I will continue to see nothing. :)

manigandham 7y ago
There are rating agencies that verify both print and TV numbers with as much accuracy as possible, and Connected TV (streaming, smart tvs, netflix, etc) now have comparable metrics to website ads. Those older mediums were also just inefficient and create a lot of wasted spend, whereas the internet has allowed far more businesses to start and thrive by lowering their customer acquisition costs. These companies would never survive if they had to still rely on older ad models.

alkonaut 7y ago

> advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less I think people like me who argue that web advertising should return to dumb/static/contextual ads also accept that it might kill a huge fraction of web revenue/jobs/content. The downside is that advertisers move to the walled gardens of a few big players, and to native advertising. I’m still more ok with that than with the way the ad industry works now.

Silhouette 7y ago

How would fraud detection work in this model? Honest but blunt answer: We (my businesses acting as advertisers) don't rely on your (Google's, or any other ad network's) claims anyway. The only thing that matters is the metrics we measure on our own sites, and we're going to be able to separate those by ad campaign anyway. We don't care about getting more Facebook likes or how many Instagram views some image gets or how many impressions Google claims to have shown on third party sites. We only care whether a given campaign gave a good return on investment in terms of direct benefits and/or actionable leads.

jefftk 7y ago
I used to work at an advertising company that worked this way, doing lead gen. In some verticals there's nothing better, and as long as your own metrics are good you can figure out how much a traffic source is worth. If a traffic source goes bad and starts being 50% spam, no problem, your automatic system lowers its bids by 50% and you're fine. The thing is, only a very small fraction of the ads ecosystem works this way. Coke wants to show ads to people to position their brand, not to get people to buy soda over the internet, which means they're not able to measure the efficacy of channels on a per-publisher basis and figure out if they're being cheated. Brand advertisers typically use third-party fraud detection services like Moat to inspect the environment their ads are running in and see if they look legitimate. Then there's a large range of people doing things where you could measure the effect of channels, but the site just isn't that sophisticated. Some pizza place somewhere buys some ads, they don't have the tech staff to measure conversions and optimize their channels, instead they trust the ad network to make sure they're not being cheated. Even sophisticated performance advertisers rely on ad network fraud detection, just indirectly. Yes, you run your ad campaign, and you bid what the traffic is worth to you based on your measurements. But the existence of that traffic stream comes from fraud detection. Imagine some publishers on an ad network start spamming it, and the ad network isn't able to detect the fraud. The money from advertisers now isn't going to publishers in proportion to the value of their traffic, but instead in proportion to how much they're cheating. The publishers that were the source of your good traffic go out of business, and the ad network collapses because it doesn't have valuable traffic to send to anyone.

JoshTriplett 7y ago

> How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Leaving aside that this isn't the problem of end users: Link to a site, use an ID for that campaign (analogous to an affiliate ID), and don't pay unless a purchase takes place. Bots can't fake that.

yoz-y 7y ago
Except many ads are not directly linkable to purchases. Coca Cola won't track you to a local grocery store and an ad for a musical won't track you when you buy the ticket a week later.
- mlguy456 7y ago
  It depends. Your credit card company knows what you bought and when, while the ad network knows the phone number linked to the PC where the ad was shown. Join the two tables and we can track you to the grocery store.
  - danielscrubs 7y ago
    Do they though? They do know where and how much, but the cashiers commonly put in an amount manually into the credit card device.
  - yoz-y 7y ago
    Even if this were done (I don’t think that either of the involved companies would or could share this detail of data) you still have a problem. What about ads that don’t work? I have put an ad on your site, it took up space for some time. The ad was bad and nobody bought anything even though a hundred thousand people saw it. The publisher is still owed money because they did their part.

justforyou 7y ago

There's not really any meaningful empirical proof of ad impressions now, just a very shady chain of trust between a handfull of companies who all have a vested interest in not scrutinizing these things too closely. Once you're at the point where you are buying traffic to meet goals, you're not going to scrutinize the origin of that traffic beyone anything that would appear to be flagrant fraud to your customers.

skunkpocalypse 7y ago

> How would fraud detection work in this model? Your business model is not our problem.

gsich 7y ago

How do they know if it's a bot?

rhizome 7y ago

>How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Maybe the dominant adops model was a mistake? To throw back to an older, simpler time: what would thinking outside the box look like for this?