5 ms·

Like you, I don't mind ads per se. I even feel badly blocking them, knowing that I'm depriving a content creator of revenue. But the issues you point out are th

by s_q_b 12y ago

Like you, I don't mind ads per se. I even feel badly blocking them, knowing that I'm depriving a content creator of revenue. But the issues you point out are the very reason I can't have them in my browser. I used a computer without AdBlock the other day, and it was like stepping back into 1999 with every page saturated with the 21st century equivalent of animated GIFs and auto-play MIDIs. An alternative ad network isn't as far fetched as it might seem. Clearly delineated simple ads were a key differentiator in early iterations of Google Search. Perhaps what we need is a "ethical ads" network, with strict requirements on what could and could not be done: 1. Plain text and link only, with clear separation of content and advertising. 2. No user tracking (Maybe with explicit opt-in? And even then with as-good-as-possible anonymization of the stored data.) 3. A deal with AdBlock and competitors to share a cut of the revenue, in exchange for allowing Ethical Ads through. If advertisers and ad networks keep following the current trajectory, there will come a day when ads are simply too intrusive, and ad blocking will go (even more) completely mainstream. Rich media doesn't do advertisers any good if no one ever sees their ads.

zabuni 12y ago
This already happens, and people were upset about it. https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140
- s_q_b 12y ago
  Very interesting as well. I had no idea this existed.
rm999 12y ago
I used to work in the ad industry and deeply analyzed this stuff. There's a lot of unspoken secrets in the industry: 1. The majority of clicks go to flashy, annoying ads. 2. People who click on these ads rarely convert, i.e. sign up for a newsletter or purchase a product. These are probably accidental clicks. 3. The ROI on advertising is often negative. 4. No one cares about any of this because click through rates are still the gold standard. Advertisers aren't savvy enough to know better, and ad agencies don't get paid either way. It's a terribly inefficient industry, made worse by the fact that attribution is very difficult ("did this costumer buy this product because of an ad?"). This all has led to a fall in ad rates, which is just leading to more annoying ads. It's a vicious cycle that makes clean, honest text ads even less likely.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  Fascinating. Inefficiency, to me, is opportunity (even if it can't always be leveraged.) A fundamentally different ad network is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. Perhaps I should get more serious. Do you know any resources, or any technical information about how people get started in this space? @ROFISH: Absolutely a hustle business, but the more experienced I get the more I think that applies to 99.99% of businesses.
  - samsolomon 12y ago
    I think this is something that has already started playing out with designer and developer oriented networks like The Deck and Fusion Ads. Better design, standardized rules targeted towards specific groups.
  - ROFISH 12y ago
    The opportunity is more in the network than the tech. For something like this to work, you have to convince both site owners and advertisers to use your network. (Not that it's a bad idea, but it's like 97% hussle and 3% tech problem.)
    - ssharp 12y ago
      I think the "easy" way to shove yourself into the market would be to tackle a niche, so you can specifically target both the advertisers and the publishers that have an audience that would engage with those advertisers. So if you decide to choose, say, online tackle shops on the advertiser side, you'd target fishing blogs on the publisher side. That way you're pretty focused on a niche and don't have to solve difficult ad matchup/inventory problems early on. The bonus is that if you figure out how to make publishers and advertisers money, you're going to make a lot as well :)
  - stevesearer 12y ago
    The only real way I'd get on board with a network is if they had access to relevant advertisers in my particular industry that I didn't already have. I've chosen to direct sell advertisements to companies in my site's industry which takes a lot more work than handing the reins over to a network or dropping in a widget, but the results are definitely worth it.
Moru 12y ago
Don't feel bad about it. All the small advertisers are glad that you don't view their ads because they know you won't buy from them anyway and would be throwing out money without getting anything for it. Expecting your visitors to look at ads that you get paid for is just another type of fraud by the content-generator against the advertiser. :-)
- s_q_b 12y ago
  I've always thought expecting direct revenue from web ads was looking at the problem upside-down. Nobody purchases directly from mainstream TV ads. The purpose is brand awareness, and sidebar ads have always seemed infinitely more useful to build such awareness among the public. Optimizing on CTR or impressions just seems like optimizing vanity metrics, because they're easy to measure.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >Nobody purchases directly from mainstream TV ads. // I doubt this is true. A small minority, yes, sure, I can certainly accept that. Any company that does a product based advertising push with a product launch also seems to disagree with you. I don't watch mainstream TV (partly to avoid advertising) but the little I do see still appears to have some direct purchase focussed ads - particularly kids toys at Christmas (it happens to be that I saw kids FTA-TV just before Christmas). CTR seems a pretty good metric for engagement (yes you can't some false clicks; also assuming no one is maliciously generating clicks). Impressions seems prone to many problems that don't make it easy to measure accurately - just because an ad is requested doesn't mean it's rendered to the viewable page area. Still, I run ads on my blog which make it self-financing. I also have donation buttons (Paypal) and modified my widgets to allow ads to be turned off per blog-post - so some posts don't have any ads at all. Never had a donation but have financed itself [ie server costs + domain names + perhaps a tiny bit more] on ads for ~8 years.
    - s_q_b 12y ago
      When I said "nobody purchases directly," what I meant was that nobody presses a button to buy Pepsi or Coca-Cola when their ads air. Infomercials would be a good counterpoint, as would direct sale telephone advertisements. But the best and most expensive television advertisements, from primetime to the Superbowl, are bought on the assumption that they increase brand awareness, driving future sales. In the online space, our ad networks seem to be stuck in a permanent parade of crosses between infomercials and billboards, attempting to push product right now. To me, that seems to be leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
vitd 12y ago
I think that eventually what's happening with TV and radio will happen with other types of media. I almost never watch TV ads anymore. I get more and more content through iTunes, Netflix, HBO, etc. where there are no ads. I TiVo anything I want to watch from the networks (even live events) and skip the ads. For radio, I use Podcasts, iTunes Radio and Pandora, and I pay to not have ads. I use AdBlock on the web, but mostly use sites that either don't have ads, or I pay to get rid of them when I'm able. I'm sure free content with ads will exist forever, but I suspect people will find more and more paid options and start using them as ads get more and more intrusive.
- fixermark 12y ago
  You're forgetting about the market feedback effect. In a world where most eyeballs are in the paid options, advertisers will find ways to co-opt the paid options. The companies that accept those contracts will have more revenue with which to deliver the same quality at a lower price, and will attract viewership proportionally, etc., etc., etc.
Springtime 12y ago
> Perhaps what we need is a "ethical ads" network, with strict requirements on what could and could not be done Personally I don't mind unintrusive (small) static image ads from quality advertisers tailored to the type of audience of the site. A List Apart I can remember having a worthwhile ad network whose ads I've actually been interested in several times in the past (which is very rare). Problem with most ads for me, and the reason I choose to block the majority, is the lack of high quality products being advertised and the fact that the click-through rate is so low the ads rely on other tactics to grab attention, fueling the desire to block them.
- s_q_b 12y ago
  Exactly. Given the vast series of networks and data miners tracking and analyzing my online interests, why can't a site manage to show me ads that I actually find interesting?
userbinator 12y ago
there will come a day when ads are simply too intrusive, and ad blocking will go (even more) completely mainstream. That is, if the war on general-purpose computing doesn't eventually make it nearly impossible to perform any form of adblocking... Currently, the most popular form of adblock is probably a browser extension. Browser vendors are seeing extensions as a possible vector for malware (which is true) and the trend seems to be for enforced signing. This gives them control over what extensions they'll accept, which also gives them the power to prevent adblocking extensions. It isn't happening now but I wouldn't be surprised if it does in the future. On the desktop there are ways around this but they are far more involved than they used to be. The situation on mobile devices is worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592 Another form is a filtering proxy. Admuncher, AdSubtract, Proxomitron, Proximodo, Privoxy, etc. These were quite popular around the turn of the millenium... The downside is that setting one up to filter SSL correctly is a pain (for the ones that do support it) and now, thanks to Superfish, the general public probably has a fear of all things MITM, user-controlled or otherwise. On a mobile device it's rather difficult to install and manage one, so hosting it remotely is better, but probably most reliable way to block ads there. A HOSTS file is another way. It works for blocking ad-CDNs quite effectively, but otherwise is very coarse-grained (easily defeated by ads hosted on same domains as non-ads.) Easy to use for desktop; will likely need to be done through DHCP/DNS server for mobile. As much as I advocate adblocking, I only do it to the ads that are truly giving me a hard time. Tasteful static images and text-only ads don't really bother me at all. It's the annoyingly distracting animated, page-obscuring, misleading, screaming, user-tracking ones that get killed.
- TorKlingberg 12y ago
  Ad blocking on mobile is also very difficult. Most mobile browsers do no support extensions at all, so it has to go through some ugly proxy trick that requires root.
Aldo_MX 12y ago
In the mobile apps world, some ad networks (ej. mopub) have a new type of ad named "Native Ad". With this type of ads you have control on how you display them, and the intended use case is to make the ad look like a part of your application. This is an explanatory PDF: http://www.mopub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Native_Ads_OneSheet-2.pdf http://www.mopub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Native_Ads_O... I believe that something similar is what the web needs.
- rurounijones 12y ago
  > make the ad look like a part of your application. That sounds terrible and deceptive for the end-user
  - Aldo_MX 12y ago
    so you would rather have a floating banner or full-screen ads like low quality apps do?
asdkl234890 12y ago
The problem with ads is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons. Each individual advertiser wants to be more prominent. All together virtually force you to block ads. In special cases, when a third party reviews all ads, as on PennyArcade, the ads tend to be much less annoying.
andyhmltn 12y ago
>I used a computer without AdBlock the other day, and it was like stepping back into 1999 with every page saturated with the 21st century equivalent of animated GIFs and auto-play MIDIs. Really? I'm not sure that's entirely true. I don't have adblock on the temp laptop I'm using because I just forgot to install it and I have barely noticed any change in my browsing habits.
tracker1 12y ago
Another thing that really gets me, given responsive design, is the lack of responsive ads... ad sizes that can go from leaderboard, to tranditional, to micro (phone) sized... as you stretch/reduce your screen size... As it is, my plan is to render whatever original size, and resizes just won't see/render ads (flux/react)... it's too much of a pain to do more than that, and don't want to show multiples of ads for a single view. I don't think things need to be plain text.. but if limited to HTML+CSS only, that would be a pretty great start.

by s_q_b 12y ago

zabuni 12y ago

This already happens, and people were upset about it. https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995140

s_q_b 12y ago
Very interesting as well. I had no idea this existed.

rm999 12y ago

I used to work in the ad industry and deeply analyzed this stuff. There's a lot of unspoken secrets in the industry: 1. The majority of clicks go to flashy, annoying ads. 2. People who click on these ads rarely convert, i.e. sign up for a newsletter or purchase a product. These are probably accidental clicks. 3. The ROI on advertising is often negative. 4. No one cares about any of this because click through rates are still the gold standard. Advertisers aren't savvy enough to know better, and ad agencies don't get paid either way. It's a terribly inefficient industry, made worse by the fact that attribution is very difficult ("did this costumer buy this product because of an ad?"). This all has led to a fall in ad rates, which is just leading to more annoying ads. It's a vicious cycle that makes clean, honest text ads even less likely.

s_q_b 12y ago
Fascinating. Inefficiency, to me, is opportunity (even if it can't always be leveraged.) A fundamentally different ad network is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. Perhaps I should get more serious. Do you know any resources, or any technical information about how people get started in this space? @ROFISH: Absolutely a hustle business, but the more experienced I get the more I think that applies to 99.99% of businesses.
- samsolomon 12y ago
  I think this is something that has already started playing out with designer and developer oriented networks like The Deck and Fusion Ads. Better design, standardized rules targeted towards specific groups.
- ROFISH 12y ago
  The opportunity is more in the network than the tech. For something like this to work, you have to convince both site owners and advertisers to use your network. (Not that it's a bad idea, but it's like 97% hussle and 3% tech problem.)
  - ssharp 12y ago
    I think the "easy" way to shove yourself into the market would be to tackle a niche, so you can specifically target both the advertisers and the publishers that have an audience that would engage with those advertisers. So if you decide to choose, say, online tackle shops on the advertiser side, you'd target fishing blogs on the publisher side. That way you're pretty focused on a niche and don't have to solve difficult ad matchup/inventory problems early on. The bonus is that if you figure out how to make publishers and advertisers money, you're going to make a lot as well :)
- stevesearer 12y ago
  The only real way I'd get on board with a network is if they had access to relevant advertisers in my particular industry that I didn't already have. I've chosen to direct sell advertisements to companies in my site's industry which takes a lot more work than handing the reins over to a network or dropping in a widget, but the results are definitely worth it.

Moru 12y ago

Don't feel bad about it. All the small advertisers are glad that you don't view their ads because they know you won't buy from them anyway and would be throwing out money without getting anything for it. Expecting your visitors to look at ads that you get paid for is just another type of fraud by the content-generator against the advertiser. :-)

s_q_b 12y ago
I've always thought expecting direct revenue from web ads was looking at the problem upside-down. Nobody purchases directly from mainstream TV ads. The purpose is brand awareness, and sidebar ads have always seemed infinitely more useful to build such awareness among the public. Optimizing on CTR or impressions just seems like optimizing vanity metrics, because they're easy to measure.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >Nobody purchases directly from mainstream TV ads. // I doubt this is true. A small minority, yes, sure, I can certainly accept that. Any company that does a product based advertising push with a product launch also seems to disagree with you. I don't watch mainstream TV (partly to avoid advertising) but the little I do see still appears to have some direct purchase focussed ads - particularly kids toys at Christmas (it happens to be that I saw kids FTA-TV just before Christmas). CTR seems a pretty good metric for engagement (yes you can't some false clicks; also assuming no one is maliciously generating clicks). Impressions seems prone to many problems that don't make it easy to measure accurately - just because an ad is requested doesn't mean it's rendered to the viewable page area. Still, I run ads on my blog which make it self-financing. I also have donation buttons (Paypal) and modified my widgets to allow ads to be turned off per blog-post - so some posts don't have any ads at all. Never had a donation but have financed itself [ie server costs + domain names + perhaps a tiny bit more] on ads for ~8 years.
  - s_q_b 12y ago
    When I said "nobody purchases directly," what I meant was that nobody presses a button to buy Pepsi or Coca-Cola when their ads air. Infomercials would be a good counterpoint, as would direct sale telephone advertisements. But the best and most expensive television advertisements, from primetime to the Superbowl, are bought on the assumption that they increase brand awareness, driving future sales. In the online space, our ad networks seem to be stuck in a permanent parade of crosses between infomercials and billboards, attempting to push product right now. To me, that seems to be leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

vitd 12y ago

I think that eventually what's happening with TV and radio will happen with other types of media. I almost never watch TV ads anymore. I get more and more content through iTunes, Netflix, HBO, etc. where there are no ads. I TiVo anything I want to watch from the networks (even live events) and skip the ads. For radio, I use Podcasts, iTunes Radio and Pandora, and I pay to not have ads. I use AdBlock on the web, but mostly use sites that either don't have ads, or I pay to get rid of them when I'm able. I'm sure free content with ads will exist forever, but I suspect people will find more and more paid options and start using them as ads get more and more intrusive.

fixermark 12y ago
You're forgetting about the market feedback effect. In a world where most eyeballs are in the paid options, advertisers will find ways to co-opt the paid options. The companies that accept those contracts will have more revenue with which to deliver the same quality at a lower price, and will attract viewership proportionally, etc., etc., etc.

Springtime 12y ago

> Perhaps what we need is a "ethical ads" network, with strict requirements on what could and could not be done Personally I don't mind unintrusive (small) static image ads from quality advertisers tailored to the type of audience of the site. A List Apart I can remember having a worthwhile ad network whose ads I've actually been interested in several times in the past (which is very rare). Problem with most ads for me, and the reason I choose to block the majority, is the lack of high quality products being advertised and the fact that the click-through rate is so low the ads rely on other tactics to grab attention, fueling the desire to block them.

s_q_b 12y ago
Exactly. Given the vast series of networks and data miners tracking and analyzing my online interests, why can't a site manage to show me ads that I actually find interesting?

userbinator 12y ago

there will come a day when ads are simply too intrusive, and ad blocking will go (even more) completely mainstream. That is, if the war on general-purpose computing doesn't eventually make it nearly impossible to perform any form of adblocking... Currently, the most popular form of adblock is probably a browser extension. Browser vendors are seeing extensions as a possible vector for malware (which is true) and the trend seems to be for enforced signing. This gives them control over what extensions they'll accept, which also gives them the power to prevent adblocking extensions. It isn't happening now but I wouldn't be surprised if it does in the future. On the desktop there are ways around this but they are far more involved than they used to be. The situation on mobile devices is worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061592 Another form is a filtering proxy. Admuncher, AdSubtract, Proxomitron, Proximodo, Privoxy, etc. These were quite popular around the turn of the millenium... The downside is that setting one up to filter SSL correctly is a pain (for the ones that do support it) and now, thanks to Superfish, the general public probably has a fear of all things MITM, user-controlled or otherwise. On a mobile device it's rather difficult to install and manage one, so hosting it remotely is better, but probably most reliable way to block ads there. A HOSTS file is another way. It works for blocking ad-CDNs quite effectively, but otherwise is very coarse-grained (easily defeated by ads hosted on same domains as non-ads.) Easy to use for desktop; will likely need to be done through DHCP/DNS server for mobile. As much as I advocate adblocking, I only do it to the ads that are truly giving me a hard time. Tasteful static images and text-only ads don't really bother me at all. It's the annoyingly distracting animated, page-obscuring, misleading, screaming, user-tracking ones that get killed.

TorKlingberg 12y ago
Ad blocking on mobile is also very difficult. Most mobile browsers do no support extensions at all, so it has to go through some ugly proxy trick that requires root.

Aldo_MX 12y ago

In the mobile apps world, some ad networks (ej. mopub) have a new type of ad named "Native Ad". With this type of ads you have control on how you display them, and the intended use case is to make the ad look like a part of your application. This is an explanatory PDF: http://www.mopub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Native_Ads_OneSheet-2.pdf http://www.mopub.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Native_Ads_O... I believe that something similar is what the web needs.

rurounijones 12y ago
> make the ad look like a part of your application. That sounds terrible and deceptive for the end-user
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  so you would rather have a floating banner or full-screen ads like low quality apps do?

asdkl234890 12y ago

The problem with ads is that they suffer from the tragedy of commons. Each individual advertiser wants to be more prominent. All together virtually force you to block ads. In special cases, when a third party reviews all ads, as on PennyArcade, the ads tend to be much less annoying.

andyhmltn 12y ago

>I used a computer without AdBlock the other day, and it was like stepping back into 1999 with every page saturated with the 21st century equivalent of animated GIFs and auto-play MIDIs. Really? I'm not sure that's entirely true. I don't have adblock on the temp laptop I'm using because I just forgot to install it and I have barely noticed any change in my browsing habits.

tracker1 12y ago

Another thing that really gets me, given responsive design, is the lack of responsive ads... ad sizes that can go from leaderboard, to tranditional, to micro (phone) sized... as you stretch/reduce your screen size... As it is, my plan is to render whatever original size, and resizes just won't see/render ads (flux/react)... it's too much of a pain to do more than that, and don't want to show multiples of ads for a single view. I don't think things need to be plain text.. but if limited to HTML+CSS only, that would be a pretty great start.