Hacker News Reader

It is really easy to bypass any kind of adblock filtering by just hosting your ads locally on your own domain, but for some reason all the 'content creators' are to lazy to go back to the old ways. When you buy a newspaper, you can't magically cut images out of it, especially if layout changes from time to time and same can be applied to web pages.

Blame those hassle-free, privacy violating personalized ad networks that infected everything.

View on HN

Most companies won't pay for advertising online without the ability to monitor performance independent of the publisher (who could easily lie to make more money) and without the ability to more accurately detect fake clicks (which the publisher could help fake). Part of the way the big ad networks work is to detect fake visitors/clicks - on behalf of the publisher and the advertiser's competitors - and exclude them. We can argue the success/failure of how well they do it, but we can't really argue that companies want it.

One way you can do self-hosted ads is pay for purchase instead of pay per view or pay per click. In this, the website would participate in an affiliate program or company, promote their product on the site, and then get a cut of revenue (sales/subscriptions/etc). Unfortunately, this is a very small portion of advertising revenue and is very hit or miss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com