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Comment by _Understated_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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