3 ms·

Yes! This is crazy to me. How can this not be a thing that has already been discovered and instantly fixed?

• londons_explore 4y ago
  Many ad buyers are not-so-sophisticated... They might work for BigCo, but rather than have the ad point to bigco.com/product they instead have the ad point to tinyurl/bitly so they can track how many people click the ad and repoint it to another URL easily. There is a whole industry of these redirection services that gather stats, direct users different directions based on mobile/desktop or country. It isn't rare to bounce a user via a whole chain of them. To support all those users, ad networks have to allow the apparent URL and actual link target to differ.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    If google gave a shit (obviously they don't) they could whitelist a few tinyurl/bitly/etc sites then follow those redirects themselves to verify they eventually landed on the displayed domain.
  • mcv 4y ago
    No, ad networks don't have to allow any of that. And they shouldn't. Ad buyers should either not track, or do it properly. Demanding massive security holes because you can't be bothered to learn the right way to do it is unreasonable.
• detaro 4y ago
  It's a "feature". So you can link to blafoo.advertisinganalytics.com/weird-looking?tracking=link but what the user sees looks like normal and "safe" brand.com
  • stingraycharles 4y ago
    You should still somehow be able to prove ownership of the domain you want to display, that’s the problem.