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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they proxy host client-side analytics on their side, and don't put the word analytics in the endpoint names?

Most ads would be unblockable if you made the ads come from your domain and have them indistinguishable from your normal content in the URIs as far as I know.

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IMO they will do this out of necessity soon enough.

This will mean advertisers can't count exact hits to their ads (or at least would be foolish to do so) so they will probably have to employ some kind of web crawler or HIT services to randomly sample the sites who are supposed to be serving their ads to make sure they are.

But eventually the blocker technology will become much better at blocking page element ads more easily and automatically. Then I guess they will have to think of something else.

This could be a huge opportunity for someone like Cloudflare. They could proxy agreed upon URLs to advertising networks and everything would originate from the same domain. Advertisers would establish a business relationship w/ Cloudflare and could trust that the traffic they are receiving is more or less legitimate.

Analytics are different from ads. When you're running analytics on your own site, you can trust your own logs. But when you are displaying adverts, the ad buyers will likely want better proof that their ad was displayed 'n' times.

They should crawl the website x-times a day (sample) to check if you ate displaying their ads. Or release a binary blob so that you can host their ads on your server (which reports back to their ad network once per hour)

Do you really think this is a feasible solution?

What are your objections?

Honestly, I'm tired of pointing to people how superficial their understanding of certain topics is and how ridiculous their "solutions" sound.

I suggested this the last time this issue came up [1]. In the case of ads, some people are saying that it becomes a problem for advertising networks to actually verify the traffic if the connection is proxied, though I think there can be solutions developed for this given the enormous amount of money being lost. As far as analytics, this shouldn't be an issue because the primary recipient of the data is the site itself, and cheating on their own analytics would only make sense for a couple of applications (trying to sell the site based upon fraudulent analytics etc).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10185256

I may be misunderstanding this but if my users download a pixel/whatever from my site not from google analytics, then google does not know anything but my server IP

Or does client side mean the user downloads JS which does some investigation and reports back?

Maybe the people purchasing ad space wouldn't be able to verify impressions?

How about static ad-pictures served from the ad-network's server? The ad network can track the impression. That's how it all began back in the nineties, and it worked fine. Everyone would be happy.

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