This is the downside and the greatest danger with more and more centralized ad networks.
Site owners: Market your ads directly or through smaller exchanges, and host them yourself. This is the only viable long-term option.
Site owners: Market your ads directly or through smaller exchanges, and host them yourself. This is the only viable long-term option.
This is nice because it makes me want to make good decisions for the user experience (no multi-page image galleries) which I believe will help attract the types of visitors my advertisers want to interact with.
Selling your own ads takes work for sure, and a different type of work. Instead of technical know how, you need to put in time and energy selling ads and not just sit around waiting for sales to come to you.
You also obviously get to keep 100% of the money from the sale which is nice.
You may be able to link up to a big player, but hosting things yourself will require quite a bit of overhead and they pay off may not be worth it, unless you're getting substantial volume (or appealing to a very targeted audience)
btw, traditional display ad CTR is rubbish from an advertisers perspective and we all want to go all in on programmatic + retargeting.
Not if the big ad companies (google's adsense) create a plugin or program that serves the ads up locally instead of making obvious 3rd party calls to their own networks. I suspect they're working on such a plugin as we speak.
I think google's looking to do what's best for their bottom line. If it becomes more profitable, or even much more profitable to decentralize in that way, they will do it without hesitation.
Perhaps they're looking for a way to decentralize their ads, yet still retain the data & meta-data. Basically, have their cake and eat it too.
Disabling javascript does not protect you against a sufficiently malicious enterprise - and I'd label both the three-letter-agencies and the ex-Soviet mafiya as such. Both have been proven to use such tactics.
Then convert it to png yourself.
You can't prevent exploits from all angles, but you can prevent exploits from some angles.