Comment by ImHereToVote
10 days ago
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
10 days ago
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
Because the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now)
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
It's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.
Really shows how shady the whole industry is, even to itself.
uBlock can filter arbitrary elements from a website, no chance that every company spends as much as facebook on making writing rules hard
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I think that just goes to prove that content providers and ad providers could defeat ad blockers if they worked together. (And perhaps made the ads less offensive so people don't have motivation to block them.)
Well facebook just beat the ad blockers without working together with their ad customers
Ad networks hate content providers. I guess it comes with the territory when you're trying to operate a money printer - you hate anyone who poses an obstacle to your money printing.
Trust?
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
Advertisers don't trust websites to display their ads. If a site takes full control of their ads experience and hosts everything first-party I agree it's hard to block (site can keep changing things to thwart the ad blocker), but then it's also hard for the advertisers to see whether they're being ripped off. Which means most won't advertise on the site, and the site makes much less money than if they remain in the current ad ecosystem (even counting that some ads will be blocked).
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).
Content based ads work fine for this. If you have a site about some topic, advertisers for that audience can just pay you some amount to put their ad in your posts or embed an image.
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
> Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.
> since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
Is it really? I would think targeted ads are way more efficient than traditional non targeted ads. Eg I've never seen menstrual pad (something I would never use) ads online.
> take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed
That's the consumers experience, not advertisers
This is to an extent why facebook can make the ads harder to block, they control the ad infrastructure (or at least some of it) as well as the app infrastructure.
For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligned with your content, could I pay for one of your advert slots?” because they don't want to just target the people who are actively looking at relevant content. They want to follow people who look at relevant content around like little stalkers, so the adverts can be put in front of you even when you've moved on to looking at less relevant content - and that requires tracking between sites which a smaller individual site can not do on its own or have the clout to negotiate a good exchange with other sites with.
Seems like this is a market gap that can be solved by LLMs. Do offline analysis of the traffic of a page and make adds completely opaque to tracking.
If I go as far as using that much compute (or paid “tokens”) to block the tracking and adverts, I think I'm better off just leaving the platform entirely!