5 ms·

How internet ads work

135 points by musikele 7y ago

cousin_it 7y ago
How do cookies make your site better, and how do I decline them?
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  I clicked the Learn more link and got a privacy policy in what looks like Italian (?). That kinda limits the audience, but a quick skimming makes me suspect that your experience is 'improved' by having the data about your interaction with that website sent to Google for analysis.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  It seems like the classic reaction to the GDPR - add a stupid cookie banner and it'll be fine. Truth is, it's not compliant. If you want to be compliant you need to ask for consent before loading any of the creepy/stalky shit like Google Analytics and Facebook Like buttons. Unless you're gonna do it properly you might as well not bother at all as you're still in breach of the regulations no matter what.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    So how do we go about hammering sites for their poor compliance? We can sit here and shake our heads, but unless there is a lever to make them behave this poor behavior will continue.
- musikele 7y ago
  Hi there. Thanks for pointing that out. My blog is usually read only by a bunch of nerds and when I put the first cookie banner, GDPR was not even a thing. I've added one that is compliant with the spec. Hope it's fine.
  - pgl 7y ago
    Hi. I clicked "I DO NOT ACCEPT" and it took me to https://europa.eu/ https://europa.eu/. Then I clicked back, and it didn't show the banner anymore. There are still 4 cookies set, including "euconsent" (set to some weird value), and "__cfduid" which I assume is some kind of unique identifier. I don't know if you're serious about implementing GDPR compliance, but this isn't.
    - notpiika 7y ago
      "__cfduid" is added by Cloudflare, and as far as I know, it can't be disabled.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
      __cfduid should be cloudflare for CDN...
    - xboxnolifes 7y ago
      cfdruid is a technical cookie and is exempt under GDPR.
- swebs 7y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the page itself has ads. Umatrix is reporting blocked requests from the usual culprits: googlesyndication, google-analytics, facebook, consensu.
- vntok 7y ago
  They allow the site owner to measure traffic patterns in order to know what to improve and whether their actions had any effect at all.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cagenut 7y ago
"The price is usually given in CPM (cost per mille - cost per thousand impressions), so if an ad has a cpm of 10$, one single impression is worth 0.01$ ! (The average cpm, at the time of writing, is around 1$ if you were asking)." This is the fundamental core of why journalism never made the jump from newspapers to the internet, and why we have the absolute cesspool of clickbait and seo-chum of a 'news media' that we do now. Its got nothing to do with ethical standards or cultural shifts or the reporters/writers/editors not wanting to do much much better. Rather, at less than a penny per pageview, the only possible way to pay even a single salary is a plummeting free-fall down to the lowest common denominator and the basest of instincts. That is why facebook was able to make a biz model of it and every other site can't. ($45,000/year salary + 33% biz-overhead) / ($1 CPM x 5 ads per page) = 12 million pageviews per month. You cannot get 12M pageviews per month in any local city, much less the ~100M it would take to have a small staff and an editor. Hence, all the local journalists are gone.
- pc86 7y ago
  This is exactly why lower tier local newspaper "publications" started splitting already short articles into 3-5 pages, and why 10-item lists require 11 or 12 pageviews to read where pages 4 and 9 are just an ad. For context, to get 12 million pageviews for a local newspaper website, if you're in a small metro of ~250k people with 5% readership, that means every single reader would need to generate nearly 1,000 pageviews a month each. Even at 2 pageviews per article, that's approaching 20 articles a day M-F.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    What I don't understand is this -- when an article is split into 5 pages, sure there are 5x more ads loaded. But wouldn't they be worth 5x less money per impression, due to overloading the user? Maybe it's a nonlinear scaling -- 5x the ads is 4x the value. Or is it because these are "branding"* ads, and so nobody really measures the ROI on them? * vs direct response
    - pc86 7y ago
alwaysanagenda 7y ago
"How Internet Ads Work" They don't.
hknd 7y ago
`How internet ads work` Most of the things in this article are just bluntly wrong. Like a "deal"(2) is not an "order"(1) - there are completely unrelated concepts. An order is a collection of line items. fyi: Academy for ads explains exactly what this blog post is trying to explain.(3) (disclaimer: I used to work on DFP/Google Ad Manager) 1: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/82235 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/82235 2: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763 3: https://landing.google.com/academyforads https://landing.google.com/academyforads
- musikele 7y ago
  Thanks for contributing. As I wrote, I'm not expert in GAM. The point of the article is to explain the process.
- magic_beans 7y ago
  None of these three links offer the same concise summary that the article provides. I don't care if minute details aren't correct. I just wanted an overview (key word being overview) of how the entire process of internet ads work and OP delivered. Thanks OP.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  I would love to hear a complete response to the things you think are wrong in this article. The order/deal incorrectness is just semantics, and not all that useful. I found the article's description of how header bidding operates useful. What's inaccurate about it? In particular, why does the header bidding library solicit bids from everyone except GAM, then ask GAM for final bid? Seems like contacting all of them would be the way to go -- or is GAM registering the ad impression for other networks as well? If so, that's really interesting! It means google has insight into the entire ad placement market, even when they don't have anything to do with the network.
  - dialtone 7y ago
    The publisher chooses the order in the waterfall for header bidding. Due to its nature Header Bidding is serial in the page and only a limited number of partners can bid on the page (4-5) and are called sequentially. Header bidding was created to increase competition for premium inventory beyond Google, so naturally Google ends up being used as remnant inventory in these cases because it’s always able to fill inventory, but not necessarily at the highest price and it’s thus placed last often but it really depends. Also recently Google has shifted the auctions to unified pricing which means 1st price basically and a single floor for them to make their prices more competitive in header bidding, so this might have had effects on Google’s position in the waterfall as well given what the publisher want to accomplish. Generally speaking the article is overall fine, there are some historical inaccuracies of sorts and innovations aren’t explained well, for example Google didn’t just start to track people because they figured, but because behavioral targeting retained customers of all sized as opposed to just the bigger ones that do brand awareness campaigns, and that was due to measurable superior performance.
cde-v 7y ago
They don't work, they provide no value, and the entire industry is a house of cards waiting to fall.
stopadvertising 7y ago
The web is getting so terrible I have started blocking all cookies and javascript by default, as well as running all the usual extensions. More and more of the web seems to get closed off to me every day with posture, but honestly I'd rather just stop using computers entirely than have everything I do be coopted by surveillance capitalism. I never agreed to any of this crap.
apeace 7y ago
I used to work in the ad industry, and I'm glad to see somebody trying to share and explain the terminology. But they left out one term: inventory. That's you.
wdr1 7y ago
I think this would be better titled how header bidding works. It's a good article on that topic, but leaves out a lot. (Which is fair, Internet Advertising is fairly complex.)
lproven 7y ago
No, that's how they are _served_. It is _not_ how they work. This is how they work: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/235539700-50841f34 https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... TL;DR. Read it anyway, it's great. But executive summary: they don't, and nobody cares.

135 points by musikele 7y ago

cousin_it 7y ago

How do cookies make your site better, and how do I decline them?

Freak_NL 7y ago
I clicked the Learn more link and got a privacy policy in what looks like Italian (?). That kinda limits the audience, but a quick skimming makes me suspect that your experience is 'improved' by having the data about your interaction with that website sent to Google for analysis.
Nextgrid 7y ago
It seems like the classic reaction to the GDPR - add a stupid cookie banner and it'll be fine. Truth is, it's not compliant. If you want to be compliant you need to ask for consent before loading any of the creepy/stalky shit like Google Analytics and Facebook Like buttons. Unless you're gonna do it properly you might as well not bother at all as you're still in breach of the regulations no matter what.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  So how do we go about hammering sites for their poor compliance? We can sit here and shake our heads, but unless there is a lever to make them behave this poor behavior will continue.
musikele 7y ago
Hi there. Thanks for pointing that out. My blog is usually read only by a bunch of nerds and when I put the first cookie banner, GDPR was not even a thing. I've added one that is compliant with the spec. Hope it's fine.
- pgl 7y ago
  Hi. I clicked "I DO NOT ACCEPT" and it took me to https://europa.eu/ https://europa.eu/. Then I clicked back, and it didn't show the banner anymore. There are still 4 cookies set, including "euconsent" (set to some weird value), and "__cfduid" which I assume is some kind of unique identifier. I don't know if you're serious about implementing GDPR compliance, but this isn't.
  - notpiika 7y ago
    "__cfduid" is added by Cloudflare, and as far as I know, it can't be disabled.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    __cfduid should be cloudflare for CDN...
  - xboxnolifes 7y ago
    cfdruid is a technical cookie and is exempt under GDPR.
swebs 7y ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the page itself has ads. Umatrix is reporting blocked requests from the usual culprits: googlesyndication, google-analytics, facebook, consensu.
vntok 7y ago
They allow the site owner to measure traffic patterns in order to know what to improve and whether their actions had any effect at all.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

cagenut 7y ago

"The price is usually given in CPM (cost per mille - cost per thousand impressions), so if an ad has a cpm of 10$, one single impression is worth 0.01$ ! (The average cpm, at the time of writing, is around 1$ if you were asking)." This is the fundamental core of why journalism never made the jump from newspapers to the internet, and why we have the absolute cesspool of clickbait and seo-chum of a 'news media' that we do now. Its got nothing to do with ethical standards or cultural shifts or the reporters/writers/editors not wanting to do much much better. Rather, at less than a penny per pageview, the only possible way to pay even a single salary is a plummeting free-fall down to the lowest common denominator and the basest of instincts. That is why facebook was able to make a biz model of it and every other site can't. ($45,000/year salary + 33% biz-overhead) / ($1 CPM x 5 ads per page) = 12 million pageviews per month. You cannot get 12M pageviews per month in any local city, much less the ~100M it would take to have a small staff and an editor. Hence, all the local journalists are gone.

pc86 7y ago
This is exactly why lower tier local newspaper "publications" started splitting already short articles into 3-5 pages, and why 10-item lists require 11 or 12 pageviews to read where pages 4 and 9 are just an ad. For context, to get 12 million pageviews for a local newspaper website, if you're in a small metro of ~250k people with 5% readership, that means every single reader would need to generate nearly 1,000 pageviews a month each. Even at 2 pageviews per article, that's approaching 20 articles a day M-F.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  What I don't understand is this -- when an article is split into 5 pages, sure there are 5x more ads loaded. But wouldn't they be worth 5x less money per impression, due to overloading the user? Maybe it's a nonlinear scaling -- 5x the ads is 4x the value. Or is it because these are "branding"* ads, and so nobody really measures the ROI on them? * vs direct response
  - pc86 7y ago

alwaysanagenda 7y ago

"How Internet Ads Work" They don't.

hknd 7y ago

`How internet ads work` Most of the things in this article are just bluntly wrong. Like a "deal"(2) is not an "order"(1) - there are completely unrelated concepts. An order is a collection of line items. fyi: Academy for ads explains exactly what this blog post is trying to explain.(3) (disclaimer: I used to work on DFP/Google Ad Manager) 1: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/82235 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/82235 2: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763 3: https://landing.google.com/academyforads https://landing.google.com/academyforads

musikele 7y ago
Thanks for contributing. As I wrote, I'm not expert in GAM. The point of the article is to explain the process.
magic_beans 7y ago
None of these three links offer the same concise summary that the article provides. I don't care if minute details aren't correct. I just wanted an overview (key word being overview) of how the entire process of internet ads work and OP delivered. Thanks OP.
edmundsauto 7y ago
I would love to hear a complete response to the things you think are wrong in this article. The order/deal incorrectness is just semantics, and not all that useful. I found the article's description of how header bidding operates useful. What's inaccurate about it? In particular, why does the header bidding library solicit bids from everyone except GAM, then ask GAM for final bid? Seems like contacting all of them would be the way to go -- or is GAM registering the ad impression for other networks as well? If so, that's really interesting! It means google has insight into the entire ad placement market, even when they don't have anything to do with the network.
- dialtone 7y ago
  The publisher chooses the order in the waterfall for header bidding. Due to its nature Header Bidding is serial in the page and only a limited number of partners can bid on the page (4-5) and are called sequentially. Header bidding was created to increase competition for premium inventory beyond Google, so naturally Google ends up being used as remnant inventory in these cases because it’s always able to fill inventory, but not necessarily at the highest price and it’s thus placed last often but it really depends. Also recently Google has shifted the auctions to unified pricing which means 1st price basically and a single floor for them to make their prices more competitive in header bidding, so this might have had effects on Google’s position in the waterfall as well given what the publisher want to accomplish. Generally speaking the article is overall fine, there are some historical inaccuracies of sorts and innovations aren’t explained well, for example Google didn’t just start to track people because they figured, but because behavioral targeting retained customers of all sized as opposed to just the bigger ones that do brand awareness campaigns, and that was due to measurable superior performance.

cde-v 7y ago

They don't work, they provide no value, and the entire industry is a house of cards waiting to fall.

stopadvertising 7y ago

The web is getting so terrible I have started blocking all cookies and javascript by default, as well as running all the usual extensions. More and more of the web seems to get closed off to me every day with posture, but honestly I'd rather just stop using computers entirely than have everything I do be coopted by surveillance capitalism. I never agreed to any of this crap.

apeace 7y ago

I used to work in the ad industry, and I'm glad to see somebody trying to share and explain the terminology. But they left out one term: inventory. That's you.

wdr1 7y ago

I think this would be better titled how header bidding works. It's a good article on that topic, but leaves out a lot. (Which is fair, Internet Advertising is fairly complex.)

lproven 7y ago

No, that's how they are _served_. It is _not_ how they work. This is how they work: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/235539700-50841f34 https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h... TL;DR. Read it anyway, it's great. But executive summary: they don't, and nobody cares.