10 ms·

The issue with server side 3rd party ads is that the advertiser has no way to assure the impressions are real.

by air7 7y ago

marcosdumay 7y ago
How relevant is this information? AFAIK, all that matters is how many conversions you get from $ spent. Both of those are perfectly visible, no tracking needed.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  How would you know that a conversion came from an impression?
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    How do you know the highway billboard or TV commercial lead to conversions? Maybe it helps society to go back to such models over destroying privacy. (And as answer to the question: Statistical methods by comparing areas/times with no ads vs. with ads etc.)
    - halflings 7y ago
      That ship already sailed. People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI. As much as many HN readers would love to see ads and even the most benign forms of tracking to disappear, if you're aiming for something realistic (e.g that would still allow ads to exist and be a minimum profitable for all involved) you cannot just go back to the dark ages, and show the same ads to everyone.
      - DennisP 7y ago
        Strangely, I still see plenty of billboards and TV commercials.
        sdoering 7y ago
        Well TV commercial effects on web traffic and on revenue are measurable. We do that for a client. We can even tell which creatives, channels, surrounding program types work better.
      - RockIslandLine 7y ago
        So what service do I subscribe to so that I never see ads at all? Ads are pollution, and need to be treated as such. Information providers need to develop business models which do not depend upon advertising revenue. (foundations, Patreon, whatever).
        johannes1234321 7y ago
        I would love that. Unfortunately I also love the fact that I can share links to sites without paywall issues. I don't know how to combine those things in a working manner. But I hope there are smarter people than me. Short term: Less tracking is good. (Not only for privacy, but also since I don't want to see "optimized" content – I want to be surprised, contradicting opinions etc. like in a good newspaper)
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        You don't have to show the same ads to everyone. You can - without detailed tracking - identify rough location of the user. (IP etc.) You can pick ads based on the content, not based on the user. (A site with beauty tips probably has different readers from a site on woodworking; a site with celebrity news has different readers than deep political analysis) And yes, Google and Facebook would make less money (disclaimer: I have a handful Alphabet shares in my portfolio and probably funds containing those) and yes spread would be higher, but this could still pay a lot of bills and interestingly could lead to revert from clickbait to proper content, as readers of proper content are more likely the target audience for high-paid ads.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        > People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI. Not willingly, but perhaps they can be forced through legislation. In any case, as long as the industry insists on spying on me, I will continue to fight them tooth and nail.
      - dasil003 7y ago
        Ad tech doesn’t a priori have the right to do whatever they dream up. We can choose to fight it with both legal and technical means.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    Tracking clicks is easy and non-invasive. Tracking exhibitions is basically impossible, even if the browser cooperates. So you either take the number of direct conversions the easy way, or you do some of the many causal research techniques later to try to discover indirect conversions. The one thing that you can't reliably do, browser privacy or not, is gathering the useless number ad-companies currently rely on.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      Tracking incremental conversions is possible with statistics but only if you know who saw your ads.
kerkeslager 7y ago
From the advertiser's perspective, that's a problem. From my perspective, good. Advertising is toxic even when it's not invading my privacy, and maybe if we make it less effective people will do less of it.
- sroussey 7y ago
  No, it would simply move even more from impression to action.
- waynesonfire 7y ago
  why is that good? you're paying for it.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    Here are the ways I can pay for it: 1. Find out about content I want. Decide to pay for it. Pay for it. Receive content. A simple, fair transaction where everyone gets what they want with no bullshit. 2. Find out about content I want. Receive content, along with ads that spy on me, distract me from the content I actually cared about, and tell me my girlfriend isn't hot enough, my car isn't fast or luxurious enough, my house isn't big enough, my family isn't safe enough, etc. Under the barrage of this constant psychological attack, I'll occasionally fall for it and end up spending much more money on things that I don't need than I would have spent on the content. And yet the content that I actually cared about and wanted to pay for only receives a fraction of those profits.
- lubujackson 7y ago
  Reality leans the other way. What eill likely happen is that sites that used to make 100k a year from ads see their revenue drop to 70k then 50k then 30k. To stay afloat they plaster more and worse ads in order to survive. This is exactly what happened during the first dot com crash when we went from $35 CPM banner ads to $1. Suddenly, ads were slathered on every page or websites simply disappeared. What we really need is a deal that works well for all three parties: advertisers, consumers and content providers. Google Adsense was this perfect solution for a while (until it got optimized to max profitability). Maybe online advertising is like social networks and can only enjoy brief moments of relative balance before the cycle starts anew.
cpeterso 7y ago
Perhaps ad servers could tag served ad images or JS with tracking IDs that get round-tripped back to the advertiser through the first-party server, third-party requests, or navigator.sendBeacon().
Glyptodon 7y ago
Assuming they implement via some kind of full server-side proxying of an arbitrary endpoint bi-directionally so that it appears first-party (and no 3rd party cookies) I would think they'd have nearly as good of means for verifying impressions as they do already. The main "downside" seems like it'd just be harder to create unified multi-site profiles as they'd have to resort to fingerprinting of some kind to track people across multiple sites.
- hnick 7y ago
  I think the main issue is impressions vs clicks. As I understand it today, I can view an ad on a random site and have a cookie with my unique ID in it saved. If I view other network ads, they know it's me and update my profile. Then when I check out, the site I'm buying from reads this cookie and reports back that it worked based on impressions. AFAIK this won't be easy to replace if a random eCommerce store is blocked from reading Facebook et al cookies, it won't be able to report back reliably. You could do something like submit their email address or other data to Facebook and see if you get a hit, but that's probably illegal in many places without permission. And in most cases, the cookie from the ads will be blocked as it's third party (but would be able to be written for ads shown on-platform, which doesn't really matter since they can track server side anyway). But clicks are very easy, you just tie a unique ID to the ad URL and have the landing page and checkout page track that. No cookies needed. It can report back in real time or later to update stats.
  - mattlondon 7y ago
    Minor point but the e-commerce site will not be able to read the cookie from Facebook - it will have a special code snippet on the "thank for your purchase" page. When your browser loads this page it also loads the snippet from Facebook (could be a 1x1 pixel or iframe etc etc) and your browser dutifully passes on the cookie as usual to facebook.com when it loads that snippet (i.e. facebook.com is the third party host) then Facebook's servers log the http request with the cookie ID so they mark that as a successful "conversion" (aka sale). The browser will not make cookies from other sites available to the e-commerce site. There is no chance for the e-commerce site to take a look at what is in the Facebook cookie
musicale 7y ago
That sounds very close to "it makes it harder for advertisers to track you." Which is of course the intent.

The issue with server side 3rd party ads is that the advertiser has no way to assure the impressions are real.

by air7 7y ago

The issue with server side 3rd party ads is that the advertiser has no way to assure the impressions are real.

How relevant is this information? AFAIK, all that matters is how many conversions you get from $ spent. Both of those are perfectly visible, no tracking needed.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
How would you know that a conversion came from an impression?
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  How do you know the highway billboard or TV commercial lead to conversions? Maybe it helps society to go back to such models over destroying privacy. (And as answer to the question: Statistical methods by comparing areas/times with no ads vs. with ads etc.)
  - halflings 7y ago
    That ship already sailed. People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI. As much as many HN readers would love to see ads and even the most benign forms of tracking to disappear, if you're aiming for something realistic (e.g that would still allow ads to exist and be a minimum profitable for all involved) you cannot just go back to the dark ages, and show the same ads to everyone.
    - DennisP 7y ago
      Strangely, I still see plenty of billboards and TV commercials.
      - sdoering 7y ago
        Well TV commercial effects on web traffic and on revenue are measurable. We do that for a client. We can even tell which creatives, channels, surrounding program types work better.
    - RockIslandLine 7y ago
      So what service do I subscribe to so that I never see ads at all? Ads are pollution, and need to be treated as such. Information providers need to develop business models which do not depend upon advertising revenue. (foundations, Patreon, whatever).
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        I would love that. Unfortunately I also love the fact that I can share links to sites without paywall issues. I don't know how to combine those things in a working manner. But I hope there are smarter people than me. Short term: Less tracking is good. (Not only for privacy, but also since I don't want to see "optimized" content – I want to be surprised, contradicting opinions etc. like in a good newspaper)
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      You don't have to show the same ads to everyone. You can - without detailed tracking - identify rough location of the user. (IP etc.) You can pick ads based on the content, not based on the user. (A site with beauty tips probably has different readers from a site on woodworking; a site with celebrity news has different readers than deep political analysis) And yes, Google and Facebook would make less money (disclaimer: I have a handful Alphabet shares in my portfolio and probably funds containing those) and yes spread would be higher, but this could still pay a lot of bills and interestingly could lead to revert from clickbait to proper content, as readers of proper content are more likely the target audience for high-paid ads.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI. Not willingly, but perhaps they can be forced through legislation. In any case, as long as the industry insists on spying on me, I will continue to fight them tooth and nail.
    - dasil003 7y ago
      Ad tech doesn’t a priori have the right to do whatever they dream up. We can choose to fight it with both legal and technical means.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Tracking clicks is easy and non-invasive. Tracking exhibitions is basically impossible, even if the browser cooperates. So you either take the number of direct conversions the easy way, or you do some of the many causal research techniques later to try to discover indirect conversions. The one thing that you can't reliably do, browser privacy or not, is gathering the useless number ad-companies currently rely on.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    Tracking incremental conversions is possible with statistics but only if you know who saw your ads.

kerkeslager 7y ago

From the advertiser's perspective, that's a problem. From my perspective, good. Advertising is toxic even when it's not invading my privacy, and maybe if we make it less effective people will do less of it.

sroussey 7y ago
No, it would simply move even more from impression to action.
waynesonfire 7y ago
why is that good? you're paying for it.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  Here are the ways I can pay for it: 1. Find out about content I want. Decide to pay for it. Pay for it. Receive content. A simple, fair transaction where everyone gets what they want with no bullshit. 2. Find out about content I want. Receive content, along with ads that spy on me, distract me from the content I actually cared about, and tell me my girlfriend isn't hot enough, my car isn't fast or luxurious enough, my house isn't big enough, my family isn't safe enough, etc. Under the barrage of this constant psychological attack, I'll occasionally fall for it and end up spending much more money on things that I don't need than I would have spent on the content. And yet the content that I actually cared about and wanted to pay for only receives a fraction of those profits.
lubujackson 7y ago
Reality leans the other way. What eill likely happen is that sites that used to make 100k a year from ads see their revenue drop to 70k then 50k then 30k. To stay afloat they plaster more and worse ads in order to survive. This is exactly what happened during the first dot com crash when we went from $35 CPM banner ads to $1. Suddenly, ads were slathered on every page or websites simply disappeared. What we really need is a deal that works well for all three parties: advertisers, consumers and content providers. Google Adsense was this perfect solution for a while (until it got optimized to max profitability). Maybe online advertising is like social networks and can only enjoy brief moments of relative balance before the cycle starts anew.

cpeterso 7y ago

Perhaps ad servers could tag served ad images or JS with tracking IDs that get round-tripped back to the advertiser through the first-party server, third-party requests, or navigator.sendBeacon().

Glyptodon 7y ago

Assuming they implement via some kind of full server-side proxying of an arbitrary endpoint bi-directionally so that it appears first-party (and no 3rd party cookies) I would think they'd have nearly as good of means for verifying impressions as they do already. The main "downside" seems like it'd just be harder to create unified multi-site profiles as they'd have to resort to fingerprinting of some kind to track people across multiple sites.

hnick 7y ago
I think the main issue is impressions vs clicks. As I understand it today, I can view an ad on a random site and have a cookie with my unique ID in it saved. If I view other network ads, they know it's me and update my profile. Then when I check out, the site I'm buying from reads this cookie and reports back that it worked based on impressions. AFAIK this won't be easy to replace if a random eCommerce store is blocked from reading Facebook et al cookies, it won't be able to report back reliably. You could do something like submit their email address or other data to Facebook and see if you get a hit, but that's probably illegal in many places without permission. And in most cases, the cookie from the ads will be blocked as it's third party (but would be able to be written for ads shown on-platform, which doesn't really matter since they can track server side anyway). But clicks are very easy, you just tie a unique ID to the ad URL and have the landing page and checkout page track that. No cookies needed. It can report back in real time or later to update stats.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Minor point but the e-commerce site will not be able to read the cookie from Facebook - it will have a special code snippet on the "thank for your purchase" page. When your browser loads this page it also loads the snippet from Facebook (could be a 1x1 pixel or iframe etc etc) and your browser dutifully passes on the cookie as usual to facebook.com when it loads that snippet (i.e. facebook.com is the third party host) then Facebook's servers log the http request with the cookie ID so they mark that as a successful "conversion" (aka sale). The browser will not make cookies from other sites available to the e-commerce site. There is no chance for the e-commerce site to take a look at what is in the Facebook cookie

musicale 7y ago

That sounds very close to "it makes it harder for advertisers to track you." Which is of course the intent.