Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit shocked about the state of advertising. When I was making websites (~early 2000s), there were a lot more options to choose from, it seems. Now you basically just have Google and this opaque network of algorithmic auctions. Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from.

I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video (thank God), but you could have unobtrusive text links, you could have banners, little buttons, HTML blocks, and so on. And yes, also annoying pop-ups and flash ads...

You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today, but I believe it was not nearly as bad as we think. It was certainly better than some alternatives (horrible pop-up-ads that installed dialers, does anybody remember them?) Back then, I was proud to not serve evil or annoying ads, and to promote articles from partners on my site - including setting links to them to promote their page ranks. (That Google shows links among search results that they get money for, but forbids slightly improving the position of search results when other people got money for it tells a lot IMHO.)

One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites?

One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites?

There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud the advertiser.

That's only 1 of many reasons. Another big one being it's a lot more time-consuming and costly to run your own ad sales team, you always have to worry about filling all ads in all countries, and the average CPMs you get may not be nearly as good as the ones without any headaches from big ad networks (well, headaches from the advertiser acquisition perspective).

How do physical newspapers prove ad serving to their buyers? I'm certain they don't point to every single newspaper thrown in a driveway.

Third parties and surveys e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Counc...

Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.

And that, eventually, is going to have to be good enough for online publishers and advertisers.

So why can't the same be done on websites? If numbers of views can't be confirmed without spying on users or trusting shady actors to do that for you, it means the business model that is based on this metric is skewed.

If one network offers approximate numbers from an expensive external audit and another network offers "exact" tracking through cookies etc., which network do you think advertisers will spend with?

Exactly such egoistic and short term thinking led us to the current situation and the widespread usage of ad-blockers, no?

In general, newspapers serve the same ads to all their users, so approximate circulation roughly correlates to an ad's reach. Websites don't, so even if you knew a website's pageview count you would have no idea what percentage of those pageviews an ad appeared on.

Sure there is; that's what DoubleClick for Publishers is for: https://www.google.com/dfp

This is a really fantastic solution in terms of functionality, but it also comes burdened with a bunch of JS calls and user profiling opportunities. It's very like Google Analytics in that respect; there's a quid pro quo if a publisher uses it.

That's still The condition for me to view ads: no third party servers, no third party JS.

This means no tracking, which in turn means the advertiser has to trust the publisher completely.

This is entirely possible - it's however not going to work through an opaque network of auctions. The publisher will have to sell the advertising space to advertisers themselves, just like print and TV, and trust the impression statistics, just like print and TV. Advertisers can't just drop $10k at the doorstep of some as network and sit back and expect statistics. They will have to drop more money, and spend even more on the surveys they have to perform to figure out whether their advertising is working.

This would be the death of the "online ad industry" as we know it, and also the death of large parts of the web as we know it. I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

How about pay-per-goal, instead of pay-per-click? I believe almost all advertisers don't like their conversion rates, and introduce things like pay-per-second-click, etc.

Ideally for advertiser would be to pay per conversion, but then we need to defraud the other side.

You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today

Is this the case? I've seen absolutely tonnes of blatantly paid-for content across the web, and if anything there seems to be much more than there ever was.

they just call it "native advertising" now :)

Or sponsored, which is fine by me.

I'm not sure vilified is the right word, but the FTC in the US and the ASA in the UK have both said that paid-for content needs to be marked as such.

The ASA rules are pretty tight. The user has to know something is paid for content before clicking. So a YouTuber putting out a sponsored video needs to include something in the title of the video, and the link, saying "sponsored content". A banner at the start of the video isn't enough.

I wish a lot more people knew the ASA were a part of EASA[1] and that EASA even exist. ASA are happy to get involved with complaints about a wide range of countries[2] (basically all Europe, Canada, Brazil, Chile and the UK Commonwealth).

eg, if you complain about an advert from a Canadian firm the ASA will refer it to the appropriate national agency for you. My limited understanding is this is reciprocal for residents of those nations too.

The rules are being flouted wholesale, yet many nations have an ASA that could do something about it.

[1] http://www.easa-alliance.org/

[2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-b...

Be wary of terms such as “sponsorship” and “in association with”
The ASA is generally likely to consider terms such as “sponsored content” as referring to a traditional sponsorship relationship, where material has been financially sponsored but over which the creator retains editorial control. Sponsorship of this kind is not covered by the CAP Code.

Using such terms to describe an ad feature is unlikely to be acceptable. Following an ASA challenge, the ASA ruled against an ad that was included in a “sponsored section” of a website and labelled as “in association with”, considering that the labels in themselves did not make clear the commercial nature of the content

> Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you could choose from.

There was a lot of consolidation. But they're still around. They're basically that opaque network of algorithmic auctions you mentionned, in fact. If they can't display one of their direct clients' ads, they sell the spot to the highest bidder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com