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Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never

Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Common sense fixes: - Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. - Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. - Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." This is how all offline ads are sold, and it's much healthier for everyone than CPM. It essentially kills the motivation for the Reddit fraud discussed here. - Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. This is a bigger issue, but putting ads on the aggregators creates perverse incentives to promote bad content and not actually pay for it. Why would you pay to put an ad on publisher A which may or may not have traffic when you can put the ad on aggregator B which will definitely have traffic? The problem is this means A cannot pay writers and the whole system breaks down.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  If you're not paying for clicks, there's no such thing as "fraud" traffic -- there's just users who convert and buy your product and those who don't.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".
  - Spivak 6y ago
    It's not that fraud doesn't matter, it just moves to the publisher because they're the ones that have to track the eyeballs now in order to advertisers to know how good their ad space is.
  - jpadkins 6y ago
    if you have 3 campaigns with 3 ad networks or ad platforms, how do you measure the ROI of the campaigns without tracking? How do you know if Facebook or pinterest is better ROI for your marketing budget?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      You can do first-party tracking where every ad would link to your website with a different query parameter (https://example.com?campaign_id=XYZ https://example.com?campaign_id=XYZ). You then just count the number of purchases from each campaign, compare that with the amount you spent on that campaign and there's your ROI.
      - jpadkins 6y ago
        Sorry, I misunderstood your post then. So you are in favor of tracking... The OP question was about banning all tracking.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  It doesn’t matter because your traffic is measured by Comscore or Nielsen or some other third party and can’t be faked. (I don’t consider being in a survey group “tracking” in the relevant sense.)
ceejayoz 6y ago
> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.
- mountainb 6y ago
  Turn off an ad blocker for a day after years of running one and you will routinely get solicitations for fake tech support lines, fake crypto ransom demands, and so on even if you are only browsing mainstream sites. This even goes for both iOS and Android phones. Digital display ads are major vectors of crime and the websites and the ad networks that serve them should be held liable for the damages that they cause to victims by facilitating the crimes. They are basically driving the cars for the burglars and helping them literally target victims like the elderly. Then they just say 'oops lol we're not liable.' It's a joke. The government should go after them like it dismantled the Japanese empire in the 1940s. Take everything they have and put the executives in prison for decades.
  - rrdharan 6y ago
    Given the hyper targeted efficiency of the modern ad networks, are you sure the fake crypto and tech support ads are going to everyone and not just to you?
    - avery42 6y ago
      It's the ad network's responsibility to never show scam ads, this has nothing to do with targeting.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      My concern would be the opposite. What if scams are only targeted towards those that are likely to fall for it like the elderly, flying under the radar of anyone who has the skills to recognize it as a scam and report it?
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
hammock 6y ago
>Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits Can you elaborate on this?
- Ninjinka 6y ago
  Yes, please elaborate, targeting seems very effective.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  It’s a red queen’s race because ad buyers have a fixed budget. You can’t get them to spend more; just spend at different places. If tracking is available they’ll buy it, but it won’t increase the total buy.
acoard 6y ago
I'm no expert, but one observation I had is podcasts seem to follow this model. Most podcast ads I hear are read by the hosts themselves, though a small number splice in targeted advertiser-provided audio (eg a UK soccer podcast will play me local Canadian ads). For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Instead, it seems they rely on coupon codes to measure conversions. I assume the podcast gets paid per coupon code redeemed. Barring show sponsors, in my experience ever single podcast ad read by a host will use a coupon code.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  Spotify will be inserting targeted ads into their podcast streams, if they haven't started already. Something to keep in mind for anyone who was thinking of listening to podcasts on Spotify. I think Stitcher does this as well.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Even if you pay for premium?
  - lukeramsden 6y ago
    Are you saying they're going to do this to paid users too, or just free users?
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      Not positive, but since they don't say for free users only I'm assuming it's everybody. Mainly for their own exclusive "podcasts" but available for other networks to use also. I get the impression these take the place of the traditional "host reads a sponsor message" time slot. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming... > Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing Yeah, that's what I like about online targeted advertising. The transparency.
wtracy 6y ago
> Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous. I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay. > Ban user tracking and targeting. Mostly disagree. I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins. Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins. > It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. That couldn't be less true. Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this. > Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play. Hard disagree. > Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market? Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.
- gpm 6y ago
  > You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play. No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot. You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.
  - 6y ago
Kiro 6y ago
Extremely unpopular opinion but sometimes I like being targeted. Just last week I was looking for a ceiling lamp but couldn't really find anything I wanted. I finally found one that I liked by seeing it in an ad that was obviously targeted. It was nice to not having to actively go through the hundreds of pages of lamps and instead get presented a few different ones in each ad group now and then, as a break in my usual feed. The drip exposure also made me contemplate each one in isolation instead of being overwhelmed. What I don't like is that I keep getting ads for lamps now after I've already bought it.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Are you surfing the web without ad-blocker? For real? But I trust you are sincere. One of my friends sincerely said that he likes ads in movies so he can get up and do stuff during the movies. He felt stuck without ads (Pre-streaming of-course).
nkingsy 6y ago
Seems like a lot of banning. Why not just prosecute the ad network for conspiracy to commit wire fraud whenever a fraud case is tried that involved online advertising? It’s one thing for a platform to not be responsible for free content, but entirely another to take money from a fraudulent enterprise and enable their fraud. Edit: to be clear the reasonableness legal concept would be in play here in the US. Plenty of frauds could slip by a reasonable advertising network review. Some clearly would not.
rtkwe 6y ago
There's a lot of reasons they're not done that way on the internet, for starters it's reverting back to requiring people in the loop for ad sales which is expensive on both sides of the equation. Add to that that the 'personalized' ads are, if the targeting is functioning properly, worth more to the buyer [0] than simple placement ads and you can see why automatic targeted ads dominate the space, human approved/sold, non-personalized ads are both worth less on a per impression basis and more expensive for the buyer and seller to use. [0] For example a make-up company really doesn't really care about putting an ad in front of me a man who doesn't wear make-up.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  “Influencers” are a new category of ad where you pay people to use your makeup or whatever on Instagram or YouTube. It’s hugely popular with consumers and modestly profitable for “influencers”, and it all works with zero targeting.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    It's relatively small in terms of advertising dollars and a pretty different kind of advertising that relies a lot on the parasocial relationship they have with their audience. Random websites have much looser relationships with their audience.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      Random websites have loose relationships with readers now because the big algorithmic aggregators have driven small sites out of existence. Back before Reddit and Facebook, small sites were common and you were expected to return regularly to see what’s new.
lorthemar 6y ago
>Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads. Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. In its current state, it's unethical and probably should be illegeal. Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.
- Liquix 6y ago
  > I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads. Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. What's so awful about TV ads? I'd be fine with seeing more "mainstream" ads if the tradeoff was no targeting/tracking.
  - b_ocu 6y ago
    >the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      The problem is that opening up the market to "Aunt Mae" will also open up the market to malicious players. The financial barrier of entry of TV & print advertising is a very effective filter against scams. I have yet to see scam ads for fake tech support or "win an iPhone by filling a survey" or some "free" trial which uses unreadable fine print to sign you up for something very expensive, but those are commonplace online.
      - stanmancan 6y ago
        So the answer to preventing scam ads is only allowing the richest companies have a chance to advertise? Surely there’s a better way.
samhw 6y ago
> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." On top of the other objections, surely this would just move the fraud to another place, by incentivising people to create fraudulent traffic so as to drive up the perceived value of the time slot?
fsociety 6y ago
Sounds like a great way to entrench larger companies that can pay for this advertising model. We underestimate the value small businesses get from the current ad market. It’s partly because of this value that ad fraud is rampant. Enabling small businesses to advertise to cheap also makes it cheap for fraudulent advertisers to commit ad fraud.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  TV, newspapers, and radio all routinely have ads for small businesses.
stevesearer 6y ago
On my site we follow a couple of the practices you mention: - No dynamic ad content (we do allow geo-ip targeting for continents and countries, but this is using a self-hosted maxmind list) - Half-month or Monthly advertising time slots In addition to those practices, we also do the following: - Self-host our ads - Sell our own ads and have direct relationship with the ad buyers - No animated advertising (only static graphics) - Advertising is tailored to the content on our website which is an indirect way of targeting users (if users enjoy our content, they will likely find value in the ads). edit: One of the benefits of the time-slot method of selling advertising is that it doesn't encourage methods of maximizing impressions (clickbait, galleries, etc) and also there is no reason to try to game clicks as with CPC.
- Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
  When you say 'on my site' would it be correct to say that you are talking about the one in your 'about' section? If so I was motivated to take a look as a way of expressing support for your design choices. However, you are using a Google-Analytics script???? Nothing wrong with that Buuuuttt.... uhm, yeah.
  - stevesearer 6y ago
    Yeah, I would like to not use GA too in the ideal world too :/ That said, we do use the Anonymize IP setting and have all of the demographic / interest settings turned off for Google Analytics. We basically whittled 3rd party stuff down to GA and a Google font, so while not 100% perfect, I am pretty happy with the strides we have made.
    - Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
      Thanks for replying. I commented on it because I spotted the Google Ajax calls which sort of lead me to believe that you might have also been using Google for the Geo-Location stuff. When combined with the GA stuff it made me do a 'hang on a minute, something doesn't match up'. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
    - 6y ago
sam0x17 6y ago
My thought on this has always been ad networks need to flip the script. Detect how much users like the content/services they are being sent to via ads (things like whether they come back on their own, upvotes, etc., can be used to detect this). Then dramatically reward the ads people found useful to click and dramatically punish (they have to pay more) the spammy ads everyone regrets clicking on. I would rather live in this kind of internet.
scotty79 6y ago
> Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. Tracking and targetting has clear benfits for me as a consumer. I see adverts for things that actually interest me. If anyting I'd like it to be more precise.
throwaway20382 6y ago
"- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." " This would end fraud. This would end mis-clicks. This would benefit the purchaser of ads AND would make the ad market more efficient. So, asking for "world peace" might be a easier route to go.
seppin 6y ago
> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Top comment is whataboutism, great. All advertising has some fraud in-baked, adtech has taken that rule to a new level.
unreal6 6y ago
> Never allow dynamic ad content To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the P&Gs of the world) to engage in the ad market far more productively, with niche products. To ignore these advantages does the benefits of the current dynamic market a great disservice.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  Does this value really exist? I remember reading some claims that even the largest companies are actually pretty bad at targeting [0]. [0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals Is that value worth it when it opens the floodgates for scams (manual review is impossible since the amount of ads is now near-infinite instead of being limited to a single ad per ad spot per period of time), misinformation (you can target your ad to only the people most likely to fall for it, while remaining completely invisible to those who might identify it as incorrect/malicious), malware or privacy violations (ad targeting involves collecting large amounts of personal data which can then leak or be misused)?
- acoard 6y ago
  It seems like the main point you take issue with isn't dynamic ad content, but the next point: >Ban user tracking and targeting. You do bring up a good point though. Reducing dynamic ad content and user targeting reduces advertising "supply." Instead of showing 10 ads at once, you show 1 ad per timeslot. Small businesses wouldn't have the in-house capacity to search for lower-cost ad options directly. They'd have to use brokers, eg some SaaS ad marketplace, or automated tooling to just submit to price-appropriate options. This does increase burden on small businesses. But most of all it increases burden on the companies that show ads. Now they have to hire (a team?) of people to manually review something that used to be automated. I don't disagree with OPs point. Manual curation would lead to higher quality of ads, and probably benefit society as a whole. Just a lot of barriers. As a counterpoint, most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themsevles reading out the ads.

shajznnckfke 6y ago

How are you going to tell which traffic is fraud if you ban tracking?

ForHackernews 6y ago
If you're not paying for clicks, there's no such thing as "fraud" traffic -- there's just users who convert and buy your product and those who don't.
Nextgrid 6y ago
If the ads are billed per period of time and not per-click or per-view then "fraud" doesn't matter; all that matters is the overall ROI; if the advertiser gets more business than what it cost them to run the ad they will consider it a worthwhile investment, otherwise they will stop advertising there forcing the publisher to adjust their prices and eventually those prices will reflect the true value (as in how much ROI it brings) of the ad spot regardless of any "fraud".
- Spivak 6y ago
  It's not that fraud doesn't matter, it just moves to the publisher because they're the ones that have to track the eyeballs now in order to advertisers to know how good their ad space is.
- jpadkins 6y ago
  if you have 3 campaigns with 3 ad networks or ad platforms, how do you measure the ROI of the campaigns without tracking? How do you know if Facebook or pinterest is better ROI for your marketing budget?
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    You can do first-party tracking where every ad would link to your website with a different query parameter (https://example.com?campaign_id=XYZ https://example.com?campaign_id=XYZ). You then just count the number of purchases from each campaign, compare that with the amount you spent on that campaign and there's your ROI.
    - jpadkins 6y ago
      Sorry, I misunderstood your post then. So you are in favor of tracking... The OP question was about banning all tracking.
earthboundkid 6y ago
It doesn’t matter because your traffic is measured by Comscore or Nielsen or some other third party and can’t be faked. (I don’t consider being in a survey group “tracking” in the relevant sense.)

ceejayoz 6y ago

> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. It's genuinely baffling, given largely bad-faith "fake news" accusations, that news organizations are willing to light their credibility on fire like this. It feeds the nonsense, and justifiably so.

mountainb 6y ago
Turn off an ad blocker for a day after years of running one and you will routinely get solicitations for fake tech support lines, fake crypto ransom demands, and so on even if you are only browsing mainstream sites. This even goes for both iOS and Android phones. Digital display ads are major vectors of crime and the websites and the ad networks that serve them should be held liable for the damages that they cause to victims by facilitating the crimes. They are basically driving the cars for the burglars and helping them literally target victims like the elderly. Then they just say 'oops lol we're not liable.' It's a joke. The government should go after them like it dismantled the Japanese empire in the 1940s. Take everything they have and put the executives in prison for decades.
- rrdharan 6y ago
  Given the hyper targeted efficiency of the modern ad networks, are you sure the fake crypto and tech support ads are going to everyone and not just to you?
  - avery42 6y ago
    It's the ad network's responsibility to never show scam ads, this has nothing to do with targeting.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    My concern would be the opposite. What if scams are only targeted towards those that are likely to fall for it like the elderly, flying under the radar of anyone who has the skills to recognize it as a scam and report it?
ntsplnkv2 6y ago

hammock 6y ago

>Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits Can you elaborate on this?

Ninjinka 6y ago
Yes, please elaborate, targeting seems very effective.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
earthboundkid 6y ago
It’s a red queen’s race because ad buyers have a fixed budget. You can’t get them to spend more; just spend at different places. If tracking is available they’ll buy it, but it won’t increase the total buy.

acoard 6y ago

I'm no expert, but one observation I had is podcasts seem to follow this model. Most podcast ads I hear are read by the hosts themselves, though a small number splice in targeted advertiser-provided audio (eg a UK soccer podcast will play me local Canadian ads). For the podcasts that follow the former model, they don't seem to rely on timeslots (i.e. payment just for ad being shown), though some may be involved. Instead, it seems they rely on coupon codes to measure conversions. I assume the podcast gets paid per coupon code redeemed. Barring show sponsors, in my experience ever single podcast ad read by a host will use a coupon code.

wlesieutre 6y ago
Spotify will be inserting targeted ads into their podcast streams, if they haven't started already. Something to keep in mind for anyone who was thinking of listening to podcasts on Spotify. I think Stitcher does this as well.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Even if you pay for premium?
- lukeramsden 6y ago
  Are you saying they're going to do this to paid users too, or just free users?
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    Not positive, but since they don't say for free users only I'm assuming it's everybody. Mainly for their own exclusive "podcasts" but available for other networks to use also. I get the impression these take the place of the traditional "host reads a sponsor message" time slot. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming... > Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing Yeah, that's what I like about online targeted advertising. The transparency.

wtracy 6y ago

> Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval. Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous. I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay. > Ban user tracking and targeting. Mostly disagree. I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins. Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins. > It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. That couldn't be less true. Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this. > Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play. Hard disagree. > Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers. I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market? Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.

gpm 6y ago
> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play. No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot. You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.
- 6y ago

Kiro 6y ago

Extremely unpopular opinion but sometimes I like being targeted. Just last week I was looking for a ceiling lamp but couldn't really find anything I wanted. I finally found one that I liked by seeing it in an ad that was obviously targeted. It was nice to not having to actively go through the hundreds of pages of lamps and instead get presented a few different ones in each ad group now and then, as a break in my usual feed. The drip exposure also made me contemplate each one in isolation instead of being overwhelmed. What I don't like is that I keep getting ads for lamps now after I've already bought it.

rightbyte 6y ago
Are you surfing the web without ad-blocker? For real? But I trust you are sincere. One of my friends sincerely said that he likes ads in movies so he can get up and do stuff during the movies. He felt stuck without ads (Pre-streaming of-course).

nkingsy 6y ago

Seems like a lot of banning. Why not just prosecute the ad network for conspiracy to commit wire fraud whenever a fraud case is tried that involved online advertising? It’s one thing for a platform to not be responsible for free content, but entirely another to take money from a fraudulent enterprise and enable their fraud. Edit: to be clear the reasonableness legal concept would be in play here in the US. Plenty of frauds could slip by a reasonable advertising network review. Some clearly would not.

rtkwe 6y ago

There's a lot of reasons they're not done that way on the internet, for starters it's reverting back to requiring people in the loop for ad sales which is expensive on both sides of the equation. Add to that that the 'personalized' ads are, if the targeting is functioning properly, worth more to the buyer [0] than simple placement ads and you can see why automatic targeted ads dominate the space, human approved/sold, non-personalized ads are both worth less on a per impression basis and more expensive for the buyer and seller to use. [0] For example a make-up company really doesn't really care about putting an ad in front of me a man who doesn't wear make-up.

earthboundkid 6y ago
“Influencers” are a new category of ad where you pay people to use your makeup or whatever on Instagram or YouTube. It’s hugely popular with consumers and modestly profitable for “influencers”, and it all works with zero targeting.
- rtkwe 6y ago
  It's relatively small in terms of advertising dollars and a pretty different kind of advertising that relies a lot on the parasocial relationship they have with their audience. Random websites have much looser relationships with their audience.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    Random websites have loose relationships with readers now because the big algorithmic aggregators have driven small sites out of existence. Back before Reddit and Facebook, small sites were common and you were expected to return regularly to see what’s new.

lorthemar 6y ago

>Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. This is probably the worst thing you can do to online advertising. It's probably one of the only good things about the online ad industry. If you book time slots, only the biggest players will be able to compete for that slot. Essentially killing the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads. Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. In its current state, it's unethical and probably should be illegeal. Advertisers shouldn't know what I like, they should only know that a certain device with a certain ID likes X,Y topics.

Liquix 6y ago
> I don't want to, ever, see online ads transform into TV ads. Targeting would be okay if it was done properly. What's so awful about TV ads? I'd be fine with seeing more "mainstream" ads if the tradeoff was no targeting/tracking.
- b_ocu 6y ago
  >the entire selling point of online ads, which is giving a chance to smaller players a chance at the game. Aunt Mae's cookie shop will never be able to compete with Pepsi for airtime
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    The problem is that opening up the market to "Aunt Mae" will also open up the market to malicious players. The financial barrier of entry of TV & print advertising is a very effective filter against scams. I have yet to see scam ads for fake tech support or "win an iPhone by filling a survey" or some "free" trial which uses unreadable fine print to sign you up for something very expensive, but those are commonplace online.
    - stanmancan 6y ago
      So the answer to preventing scam ads is only allowing the richest companies have a chance to advertise? Surely there’s a better way.

samhw 6y ago

> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." On top of the other objections, surely this would just move the fraud to another place, by incentivising people to create fraudulent traffic so as to drive up the perceived value of the time slot?

fsociety 6y ago

Sounds like a great way to entrench larger companies that can pay for this advertising model. We underestimate the value small businesses get from the current ad market. It’s partly because of this value that ad fraud is rampant. Enabling small businesses to advertise to cheap also makes it cheap for fraudulent advertisers to commit ad fraud.

earthboundkid 6y ago
TV, newspapers, and radio all routinely have ads for small businesses.

stevesearer 6y ago

On my site we follow a couple of the practices you mention: - No dynamic ad content (we do allow geo-ip targeting for continents and countries, but this is using a self-hosted maxmind list) - Half-month or Monthly advertising time slots In addition to those practices, we also do the following: - Self-host our ads - Sell our own ads and have direct relationship with the ad buyers - No animated advertising (only static graphics) - Advertising is tailored to the content on our website which is an indirect way of targeting users (if users enjoy our content, they will likely find value in the ads). edit: One of the benefits of the time-slot method of selling advertising is that it doesn't encourage methods of maximizing impressions (clickbait, galleries, etc) and also there is no reason to try to game clicks as with CPC.

Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
When you say 'on my site' would it be correct to say that you are talking about the one in your 'about' section? If so I was motivated to take a look as a way of expressing support for your design choices. However, you are using a Google-Analytics script???? Nothing wrong with that Buuuuttt.... uhm, yeah.
- stevesearer 6y ago
  Yeah, I would like to not use GA too in the ideal world too :/ That said, we do use the Anonymize IP setting and have all of the demographic / interest settings turned off for Google Analytics. We basically whittled 3rd party stuff down to GA and a Google font, so while not 100% perfect, I am pretty happy with the strides we have made.
  - Pick-A-Hill2019 6y ago
    Thanks for replying. I commented on it because I spotted the Google Ajax calls which sort of lead me to believe that you might have also been using Google for the Geo-Location stuff. When combined with the GA stuff it made me do a 'hang on a minute, something doesn't match up'. Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
  - 6y ago

sam0x17 6y ago

My thought on this has always been ad networks need to flip the script. Detect how much users like the content/services they are being sent to via ads (things like whether they come back on their own, upvotes, etc., can be used to detect this). Then dramatically reward the ads people found useful to click and dramatically punish (they have to pay more) the spammy ads everyone regrets clicking on. I would rather live in this kind of internet.

scotty79 6y ago

> Ban user tracking and targeting. It's a red queen's race and no one benefits. Everyone is better off once it's illegal. Tracking and targetting has clear benfits for me as a consumer. I see adverts for things that actually interest me. If anyting I'd like it to be more precise.

throwaway20382 6y ago

"- Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions. Instead of selling by CPM, publishers should say "independent analyst X says we have traffic Y on an average Sunday. You can buy placement for next Sunday for $Z." " This would end fraud. This would end mis-clicks. This would benefit the purchaser of ads AND would make the ad market more efficient. So, asking for "world peace" might be a easier route to go.

seppin 6y ago

> Every newspaper in America has obvious scam ads on its homepage. The whole online ad market is diseased and needs to be uprooted. Top comment is whataboutism, great. All advertising has some fraud in-baked, adtech has taken that rule to a new level.

unreal6 6y ago

> Never allow dynamic ad content To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals. It must be considered, especially for small businesses who may not be able to afford larger timeslots, as are being proposed here. I think it is important to remember that a huge part of this more personalized marketing approach is that it allows small companies (not the P&Gs of the world) to engage in the ad market far more productively, with niche products. To ignore these advantages does the benefits of the current dynamic market a great disservice.

Joker_vD 6y ago
Does this value really exist? I remember reading some claims that even the largest companies are actually pretty bad at targeting [0]. [0] https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201
Nextgrid 6y ago
> To remove dynamic ad content ignores the value that can be unlocked through targeting to more specific individuals Is that value worth it when it opens the floodgates for scams (manual review is impossible since the amount of ads is now near-infinite instead of being limited to a single ad per ad spot per period of time), misinformation (you can target your ad to only the people most likely to fall for it, while remaining completely invisible to those who might identify it as incorrect/malicious), malware or privacy violations (ad targeting involves collecting large amounts of personal data which can then leak or be misused)?
acoard 6y ago
It seems like the main point you take issue with isn't dynamic ad content, but the next point: >Ban user tracking and targeting. You do bring up a good point though. Reducing dynamic ad content and user targeting reduces advertising "supply." Instead of showing 10 ads at once, you show 1 ad per timeslot. Small businesses wouldn't have the in-house capacity to search for lower-cost ad options directly. They'd have to use brokers, eg some SaaS ad marketplace, or automated tooling to just submit to price-appropriate options. This does increase burden on small businesses. But most of all it increases burden on the companies that show ads. Now they have to hire (a team?) of people to manually review something that used to be automated. I don't disagree with OPs point. Manual curation would lead to higher quality of ads, and probably benefit society as a whole. Just a lot of barriers. As a counterpoint, most podcasts use this manual curation model with the hosts themsevles reading out the ads.