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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> A single VPAID ad absolutely demolishes site performance on mobile and desktop, and we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers.

The site is responsible for including ads; "publishers" should get the full blame from their readers. The publishers themselves can complain to the ad network they use, but readers are right to just blame the publishers.

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It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with.

The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense, the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of networks were infiltrating through that little window.

The only reasonable action was to just turn it all off and forgo the marginal ad revenue. We now only host ads we have sold direct.

>It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with.

Then the publisher should stop working with networks that do this.

That's not in our control as users, only the publisher can do that.

The problem is pretty much all networks do this.

Maybe there's a market there? An ad network content providers can trust.

Even well known news websites have ios app store redirects that stop content from being viewed.

There has been a market for years. But it takes scale to pull it off. I hoped Facebook or Microsoft would jump into it, but that never happened.

There are far too many attempts at this. There are almost no successes, and frankly i wish people would stop trying to make new ones and start working on consolidating existing ones into one that actually had enough publishers to act as a real player.

Adblock Plus tries to do that https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

Maybe what we need isn't an ad network, but a service that makes it easy for sites to self-host ads. Like some sort of gateway- I'm thinking adapter pattern- so that advertisers build their ads to a certain spec, and the web site plugs them in. The ad isn't served by a third party, just spec'd by it. We'd also need a plug-and-play payment pattern.

That gateway is an ad network.

Now, if it was an open standard without a gateway, it would be a different beast. But fraud would kill it.

No- the ad isn't served by the gateway. It's not an ad network. It's a standard (open or not) combined with the service to help advertisers conform and site owners to plug them in. Like itunes for ads.

Ad networks seem to be immune to fraud. Large companies will pay to have their brands seen anyway; us small guys take the hit.

Having worked for an ad network that went under due to fraud, I politely disagree that they are immune.

Interesting. Is the story online? Do you want to share?

Sales people sign up publishers, I make the determination they are fraudulent, VP of Sales overrides my decisions, I leave company, advertisers demand refunds of dollars already paid out to publishers, rinse, repeat.

Hmmm. ok. Service trumps network then, for sure.

It's as much in your control as a user as it is for the publisher; both actions involve complaining up the chain and/or boycotting the upstream service.

Thus, adblockers. Maybe we need something like Adblock Plus at the publisher level which lets through the "good" ads and blocks the abusive ones? Something tells me that publishers don't really care enough to go that far though.

We now only host ads we have sold direct.

Thank you. I turned off ad blocker for your site (one is still networked to the bad guys, though...)

Thanks :)

We're still talking internally about what we're going to do with the social stuff -- we're leaning towards kicking it out -- as well as the user insight we're granting to Google in return for using its (excellent) DFP to serve our own ads. Is that what you mean, or have we missed something?

I'm getting doubleclick and quantcast on the .com site.

Have you considered self-serving your ads? I do it in addition to selling directly and so far, no advertisers have questioned it.

I use a site that self-serves and charges by cpm, and I'm loving it. ppc doesn't work for me at all.

Edit: By "use" I mean I buy ads there.

Edit 2: Damn, that's some nice looking stuff on that site.

> We're still talking internally about what we're going to do with the social stuff -- we're leaning towards kicking it out

You don't have to get rid of social buttons; for some sites, they produce significant results. Just turn them into links and locally hosted static logos rather than scripts.

If Google started getting significant complaints from large publishers about the crap being served over the network, perhaps they'll limit the garbage possible to serve through adsense.

It's this crap that's destroying the web and making people's devices unusable. Until it stops people will continue installing ad blockers. No amount of guilt trip adblock walls will stop that.

With large publishers, the people that could send such a message to Google are the same people that are responsible for maximizing revenue. Will they bite the hand that feeds them?

> If Google started getting significant complaints from large publishers about the crap

I tried to complain, but ad_server.py didn't care.

If the only way publishers can make money is by screwing people over then maybe the whole business model is the problem and life would be better without all those blogs.

Here's an alternative. Specialist sites sometimes sell ads directly to the advertisers without using a network. They can choose what they show, and often won't accept ads that don't relate to their users. Not really an option for a dilute gossip news blog though.

This is what I do on my site and the feedback I've received from readers of positive. Advertisers also like that the content is specialized because it generally means that the readers will more likely to have a need for the products.

As a user, I'm requesting only YOUR content. I don't get a choice past that what your revenue model looks like. Your decision (or not) to host ads from various networks means that from my perspective, I visit your page and suddenly my performance / bandwidth turns to garbage.

Ergo the lesson I learn is to not visit your site. How's that a net positive for content creators?

Were you planning on paying for the content otherwise?

If you were planning to add a payment option that is acceptable to me, sure!

I have no idea. I haven't seen the content before-- but when I show up and my first experience is a power and bandwidth draw, not only will I not pay for the content, I won't return to that site willingly.

This becomes a problem for the publisher more so than the reader from my perspective. My job in the context of this relationship is fundamentally to consume your content. Your job is to figure out how to monetize your content in a way that isn't offensive and is sustainable.

I'm not saying I won't pay for quality content (I do!), but there needs to be a way to monetize that's respectful of your readers.

So you're saying you might not pay for low quality content. But the publishers don't think this way. They want to you pay regardless if you like the content or not. It's like going to a restaurant. You can choose never come back again if you don't like the food, but you have to pay this time.

Maybe. Maybe I buy your magazine in paper every month and just expect being able to read the content online, too.

The hard part, for me, is that if I have 20 tabs open, I don't know which ad is killing my bandwidth and performance. In fact, it might be all of them combined.

If you use Chrome/Chromium you can see with More Tools > Task Manager and view Memory/CPU/Network usage by tab.

"We now only host ads we have sold direct."

Do those ads include any JS? If not, you've figured out how advertising should work.

I agree...

I know nothing about the web advertising industry or how it works with bidding and so on and I don't think I am alone.

So if a site has ads then as far as I am concerned the buck stops with the them: I have no knowledge of the ad setup or what deal the site has and I don't care either - the site owner takes the responsibility and if I have a negative effect (hacked/malware/slow load or whatever) then I won't be back.

If you bought a car and it had a dodgy handbrake then you would blame the manufacturer of the car, not the company in Outer Mongolia that supplies it to them, or worse, the company that supplies them with their plastic... same applies here.

I don't think it's a fair comparison, but I get your point. I am not saying the user should know to blame the advertiser instead of the publisher, I'm saying it really sucks that the publisher is the one getting thrown under the bus and blamed for what is the advertiser's fault and it sucks for us publishers.

The suggested solution to "figure it out" and "find other advertising networks" doesn't work because almost all of them do this shit.

Maybe advertising is moving towards being a dead revenue model, and something else needs to take its place.

Only "almost all"? Why not use the few that don't? Is it because your revenue from them will be lower? Maybe it's lower because they aren't forcing these profitable ads at your users. That really does sound like the publisher's fault for choosing the most profitable ad network and neglecting the user's experience. Any "good quality" ad network is bound to pay less, otherwise they'd all be doing it.

I'm actually not aware of any except for maybe http://decknetwork.net, which is very selective in accepting publishers and only serves certain verticals.

And yeah, if the revenue from some other obscure network is 10% of AdSense, and a good business becomes not viable, it's not good for anyone.

There are a few, we're one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902556

I don't mean to sound harsh and I know you personally didn't create spammy ads and so on but if your chosen method of achieving $n per month is to use an ad network that doesn't give a shit about the end user then your business model is the problem here.

You can choose NOT to use them if you want to.

NOTE: I am referring to all content creators that do this: I don't mean to aim at you in particular.

It must be awful for you poor publishers to cash all those checks from serving malware to innocents. I can only imagine your heartbreak and pain as you accumulate that money, spending it on a your lifestyle in a vain attempt to alleviate the guilt from it.

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