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Comment by cantlin | Hacker News Reader

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important.

We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it.

We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!"

Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.

The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry.

I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.

Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.

[0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid

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I've spent months working on the video players for all the brands for one of the largest media companies in the world.

I did plenty unpleasant work for them, like building a clean redesign, agonizing over page load speeds, and then filling up the page with multi-megabyte tracking tools and every possible ad under sun (which would not only ruin the design, but often inexplicably and randomly break the page because of really, really shitty code).

All that work was pleasant compared to the horror of working on the video player though, and I felt bad for the full-timers who were usually put on 'bug-fixing' duty while we contractors got to work on the cool projects...

I always feel like people are brave to admit they do this sort of work, and I have less of this feeling reading about much older professions. However it's very interesting and the stories are often both amusing and horrifying whatever my overriding view.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying (or implying), but I'm curious. Could you elaborate?

I perceive the industry to be a waste of very talented people's time and skill sets. The brains doing this stuff could solve some huge problems yet they are just working on ways of serving up more adverts in more distracting ways. Somewhat in conflict with this view of mine is my interest in the stories that come out of the industry and the clever ways hard problems are solved.

Hah, I agree. That's why I developed some degree of depression and vowed never to do this kind of thing again. Not that I'm likely to solve some huge problems, but at the very least I don't want to make the world a worse place.

I don't know if your view and interest are in conflict though. Valuable knowledge can come from bad sources, no?

Thanks for the reply - I was trying to avoid sounding insulting. There are ethical dilemmas with my job so it would be a little rich to go there. Regarding good data, bad source (adding to Godwin's law), Nazi medical experiments and the more recent use of their data. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

Hehe, that was exactly what I was thinking of, but I wanted to avoid Godwinning. So I Godlost.

It takes all kinds of people and jobs to make this world work. There's no such thing as just realigning effort to "solve some huge problems".

Advertising is a massive industry and while it does have some plenty of annoying outputs, it has also powered the commercialization and expansion of the internet to what we have today. The world has definitely benefited from all the rich content, services and companies like Google that are available because of it.

> There's no such thing as just realigning effort to "solve some huge problems".

There is, it's just very hard to do and usually requires some potential catastrophe and a lot of money to do. Yes, advertising has funded some great things, but many of them I avoid. I want my data to stay where I put it and don't want to be tracked and sold. Pretty sure I'm losing though.

As someone who's been in the adtech business for years, I admire the Guardian for being one of the better engineered sites out there when it comes to ads. At least you guys have fast loading content and try to optimize the experience as much as you can.

We built a brand new modern ad network[1] and it's amazing how few advertisers and publishers care or even understand how important a good user experience is.

1. https://instinctive.io

Seems like the ad market is bifurcating: "native content" for those with ad blockers, and ridiculous garbage-ads for those who either (1) don't have the tech literacy to install and run an adblocker, or (2) are whitelisting out of empathy for content creators.

Increasingly I believe we'll see the former.

Does "native content" (paid-for pieces disguised as objective information) require "sophisticated" ad network tech?

There's a difference between the formats and the distribution systems.

Content has always been a good marketing tool, we're just starting to see a lot more of it with publishers setting up their own "agencies" to sell pieces written by the same teams but for advertisers. Some are actually really great (Netflix stories for example).

When it comes to distribution, there is just a lot that needs to be done for advertising. Part of the big draw for digital/online is all the data you can collect and analyze and use to optimize. Publishers usually do not have the technical resources to build this or manage and integrate with all the other thousands of systems that advertisers use. It's almost always worth it to have a vendor that specializes in the infrastructure so publishers can just focus on their own business.

However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.

> However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.

The major adblocker filter lists tend to quickly add filters for "native" ads on any site with a non-trivial number of users.

Rather than moving to native ads, start planning today for how you could do without ads entirely. If that doesn't turn up any answers, you should worry about your future.

Adblockers are just software and there are already dozens of ways to work around this. It's not the end of the world but a new paradigm that requires more work than before. Part of the benefit is that it's a reset in the industry that should get rid of some of the bad vendors and help improve the experience by showing advertisers that consumers do care about UX and choice.

Advertising will always be around though. No need to worry about that future. People want content but they don't want to pay, and advertising is a great model that works well for the vast majority. In fact digital advertising today is bigger, stronger and better than ever.

It's the legacy tech, formats and thinking that are broken, but progress is being made and everything will get better soon enough.

How is digital advertising 'better than ever' when everyone seems to agree that the situation is untenable?

I admire your optimism that putting consumers and advertisers in a directly adversarial relationship (by forcing them into an arms race around blocking) will somehow make everything great, but I have a hard time sharing it.

Hey Maciej - maybe this will go better than our twitter exchange a few months back.

This is a much longer discussion than fit for HN but digital advertising is doing better in pretty much every metric: There's more time spent with ads, deeper engagements, more conversions/ROI and better formats than ever before. Take a look at any of the big apps and platforms that have billions of interactions that happen every day for the data to back this up. Adblocking, even at the scale it is today, is still a small percentage of the entire market.

I'm not sure who you're referring to with "everyone" but the situation is definitely not untenable. It's just outdated. Advertising is always a relationship between the advertiser, publisher and consumer but the consumer was never really considered in the past because they had no power or way to provide feedback. Adblocking is changing that dynamic and giving power to the people while letting advertisers know that they need to actually consider the user experience.

Since the advertising model isn't going to go away, the natural evolution is that the implementation and approach will change to create better experiences that fit with the way people consume media along with the expectations around privacy, relevance and value. The market will also re-calibrate and rise up from the artificially low rates of today.

This is a massive industry so it won't be quick and there will be lots of pain in the short term. No way around that, but progress is happening and things will absolutely get better. It might be a hated industry (and for good reason) but there are plenty of good people out there working hard and doing the right thing.

> Since the advertising model isn't going to go away

There are plenty of people who would like it to, and personally I hope they win. With sufficiently widespread and robust use of adblocking technology, perhaps advertising will become sufficiently unworkable to go away entirely.

Ads will never disappear entirely, because at a basic level, they are really just packets of information. Some are more obnoxious, targeted, and/or dangerous than others, but seeing as how the internet was created to facilitate the distribution and dissemination of information, selfish ads will always find a way to latch into and ride along on more useful and/or altruistic information.

I'd rather live in a world where billboards/TV commercials serve as clearly delineated frames for ads to exist in, rather than the world we are moving towards, where essays and "news" articles hide behind a facade of objectivity while subtly promoting some sponsor's content.

But submarines/native content is the logical end of all freely-published syndicated content on the web, given the arms race between ad blockers and ad networks. What could be more user-friendly than an ad disguised as an article?

Time to start paying for good content - the free ride for us common consumers is over.

> What could be more user-friendly than an ad disguised as an article?

An actual article. It's not an "ad" or "submarine content" if it's a legitimate product review or similar.

So user-friendly, that the mistrust of the Internet is probably higher than ever [1]. Sometimes it's legitimately hard to tell what is real, and what is an ad, whether it's some website about some health concern (my favorite BS ones), some tech review site, or god knows what else. And as a discerning, analytical reader with a scientific mindset, I've trained myself to do my own research via studies and reputable sources (health) or even message forums (tech).

The user-friendliness of the ad industry presently is somewhat terrifying to me, if I'm honest.

1 - I can't back that up. :-) But why would I bother, when I can just state it, like one of those 'Top 3 Tablets [whose manufacturers that paid us ]' or 'Glowing Review of New Macbook [ with softball criticisms] '?

I guess the irony/humor was lost in my post.

My non-ironic point: there's tremendous mistrust now on the Net, as information seems more dubious than ever - from the curating of news (recent story with Facebook) to the paid reviews (Amazon finally cracking down on, but which are still quite ubiquitous), to ads that look like articles. If there's a reason I come to this site, it's because I feel like I have a more direct line to the truth, and it's 'curated' by discerning readers and comments. (Some of whom, ahem, are a little aggressive in their downvotes).

Now, how is that not a souring of the good faith of the reader, when the ad industry pursues insidious/sinuous/backhanded tactics, all because the reader doesn't want to see, hear or read something that the ad industry wants them to see, hear or read.

You've said the same thing several times in all the advertising related threads. While I understand some of the sentiment, let me be as blunt as possible: Advertising will never go away.

The fundamental model of advertising giving free access to content is great and works for pretty much everyone. It's fast, simple, egalitarian, requires no commitment and is very scalable.

Adblocking tech will never cover 100% of ads, there will always be workarounds and other developments to either serve ads or refuse adblocking users. With all the adblocking growth we've seen so far, it's still a tiny part of the ad market. Whatever we've lost in adblocked impressions has been more than made up for in all the mobile apps and platforms that take up more and more of people's time.

If you really want to pay for content then there are increasingly more options being offered, but this does not need to be mutually exclusive of ads. It's just a different option and more choice is the real solution.

>The fundamental model of advertising giving free access to content is great and works for pretty much everyone. It's fast, simple, egalitarian, requires no commitment and is very scalable.

Is it? Step back from the Internet. How many people keep things laden with adverts? Cars, magazine and appliances come covered in advertising crap. Better quality things suffer a less from this. We throw things away that are covered with adverts, or at a minimum pull them off. Things that come as they are, unadulterated, are things I place a higher value on. By and large adverts mark things out as cheap. I may be different to others in this regard but I like to pay more, lose the crap and that be it.

Is it what?

> How many people keep things laden with adverts?

I dont know but this doesn't really have anything to do with the advertising model. Ads don't need to be around forever to do their job. Digital ads are by definition very ephemeral and instantaneous.

> Things that come as they are, unadulterated, are things I place a higher value on. By and large adverts mark things out as cheap.

That's because ads do make goods/services cheap(er). If you dont want ads, then you have to make up the cost by paying it yourself. You're just talking about a spectrum on how much of the true cost you want to pay.

> but I like to pay more, lose the crap and that be it.

Ok, you can do that. More publishers are starting to offer paid subscriptions and there are services like patreon, flattr, blendle, optimal, google contributor and more. More choice is good but most will choose ads for free content.

> We throw things away that are covered with adverts, or at a minimum pull them off.

A former coworker posted a picture of her baby on Instagram wearing a GAP tshirt. That's an advert that's only going to get thrown away when the kid outgrows it.

Advertising is doing 'better than ever' because for every x% increase in adblocking users, the adverts seen by the remaining people become more than x% more predatory. You can tell that a market is healthy and sustainable by looking at its bottom line.

See also: Cable TV.

Digital advertising is genuinely not good for anyone. I now work at a major media organization and the other day I was forced to install uBlock Origin on their news desk because they were viewing their own paper's online edition and doing digital story editing, and the ads were preventing the stories from being written because they were crashing their preferred browser.

I told the lady she'd better not tell anyone if she wanted to get her work done and allow stories to be published on the same website that serves those same ads.

What is a "native" ad?

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

It used to be called "advertorial" or "special advertising feature". It's an ad disguised as content.

Done well, everyone wins: good content that pushes a message for the advertiser. It's not done well very often. Quartz has done it well a fair amount.

Ok - I just wanted to verify the same. So what technology, besides AI beyond the means of our browser's JS engine, could filter out ads that are just inline HTML? I ask this because it seems likely that we'll soon be "back to the future" with "advertorials" and "sponsors" etc. and that it will be a way out of this dilemma for publishers.

When ever people call native content for "paid-for pieces disguised as objective information", I keep remembering that those are also often a under the table affair. Its hard to both pay taxes on get-paid-for-pieces and keep the fact secret from both readers and market regulative agencies that enforces advertisement laws. Somehow I believe that a scheme that rely on evading taxes can't become too much mainstream.

Thanks for your insight.

Maybe I'm naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?

I'm no expert but I believe the clickthroughs are measured in tiny fractions. It is quite possible you don't know anyone who clicks on them on purpose, but that doesn't mean few enough people do it to not make money.

Advertising is a weird business.

There's different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads). Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now), television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad industry because that's where all your customers are and it's very trackable.

The value to the advertiser is either direct-action ("click here and buuuuuy!") or branding ("we exist, see!") Companies like Verizon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, unilever, etc. spend billions on branding.

How does that money get allocated? Well, you've got a brand manager for, say, Acme Inc. Their job is "Get more people to buy" and they split their resources between creative--often working with big agencies (think Madmen, see AdAge)--and media buying. There's often pressure to spend less on creative and more on ad buys. And when ad buys don't perform, they say "We should have spent more on creative".

Media buying is basically buying banner ads (or tv or whatever). They're typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions), less often Cost Per Click.

So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is.

> So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is.

I'll be the first to say there's a lot of mismanagement, incompetence, politics, etc that leads to this but it's also one of the most data driven industries around and there's a lot of proof behind the results. It's not all just random guessing.

I'll go even further: it's a big industry. Companies of all size and sophistication buy advertising in huge amounts.

You have some players who have honed their advertising strategy for years to try to get the biggest bang for their buck- and they're willing to pay to have professionals work out how to hone it further.

You also have unheard-of locals who have pinstriped sales reps telling them about how much money they're going to make if they buy this billboard or phone book page, and agencies paying big bucks to get the pinstripiest, salesiest representatives to the right suckers as efficiently as possible.

Then there's everything in-between for all the people who are in way over their heads but want to at least imitate the ones who are doing it right.

Despite all that data though, there's still very little in the way of a clear approach to figuring out cross-channel attribution, valuing view-throughs etc.

This is a case of it being simple but not easy.

The technical strategies are pretty straightforward but it's all the business policies, silo'ed data, bad integrations/tech, privacy issues/constraints, and (the worst of all) politics and outdated thinking, that cause these issues.

Attribution isn't that hard, it's basic analytics and statistical analysis - but half the agencies don't have any understanding of math or tech and just use last click wins with some unreliable vendor and probably poor implementation which ultimately hurts everyone.

As someone who has invested countless hours reviewing attribution reports and has seen how it is handled by companies of all sizes (including up to Fortune 50 brands), I respectfully disagree with your statement that "attribution isn't that hard."

I have the fortune to also work with an incredibly bright Data Science team (several of whom have phenomenal stats backgrounds), and they all agree with me.

Many companies and agencies know last click has very real limitations. Likewise, for anyone that has started to go down the rabbit hole, you quickly find all of the other static models have similar limitations. Dynamic/data-driven attribution at the user path level is the way forward, and Adobe's econometric attribution modeling tools are the closest I've seen to getting it right. But even that has limitations (cost being just one of them). The free reports in GA and AdWords are a great start, but likewise have their own issues.

There are a LOT of variables in terms of sample sizes, data accuracy, inability to effectively isolate an experiment group due to other marketing efforts, etc. that all throw other major wrenches into this.

All of that said, I'd genuinely love to hear your solution for how to definitively solve attribution from an analytics and statistical analysis perspective. As much as I disagree with your statement, I realize I don't have all the answers, and if you have them, I (and many others) want to hear them.

Personally, I think this is the biggest challenge the industry faces right now. My gut says display and video CPMs are overvalued, but better analytics and better data are needed to really help advertisers answer the questions of things like "what is a view through worth?" or "how much revenue should I attribute to this display/video campaign?"

> They're typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions)

M is for mille, not impressions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille

;)

I've ran ads before (via Google AdWords), we had a few motivations:

- Name recognition. We don't need people to click, we just need them to associate our brand with their need.

- Sales leads. They have a need, we have a product, it wasn't a massive sales boost in B2B, but it paid for itself.

- Push competitor's ads down. Diminish their brand recognition/leads/etc.

- Advertise on competitor's search results, show us as a legitimate competitor in the consumer's mind.

The ultimate goal is that people in the industry say "we've heard of you." Very targeted adverts are a great way of doing that along with social engineering and attending inter-industry events.

It might sound crazy, but it was better for us overall if people didn't click. We got more value out of passive advertising than active click-throughs.

It is just like waving your hands around and saying "we exist!"

The ultimate goal is that people in the industry say "we've heard of you." - I have purchased items based on just that. If there are multiple options then its easier to choose the one you have heard before be it from a ad.

> nobody wants them, everybody ignores them

While the former is true, the latter is not. And clicks aren't the only measure, especially where video is concerned. There's a lot of voodoo in advertising, but advertisers do look at their statistics, and see an uptick in sales/brand awareness/etc when they run video ads like that.

I think most people here probably have your point of view. I certainly do. I don't think I've ever intentionally clicked on an ad. These days I am aggressive with ad blockers backed up by a local /etc/hosts file to neutralize the most common ad network domains.

But the general public? I don't know. I don't think a lot of people really distinguish between the ads at the top of a google search and the actual search results below (sometimes well below) them.

I think if the current model was not thought to have an overall positive ROI for the advertisers, it would have failed by now, or evolved into something else.

I find the idea in tech that "ads don't affect us" to be baffling. As others have pointed out, it's ridiculously effective and money well spent.

I think in very few cases (maybe Amazon ads are an exception) ads cause people to go out and immediately buy things -- but with constant exposure over time, the likelihood that you're going to buy something goes up.

Seriously, this is an entire profession, it's not voodoo, people aren't just sheeple, it works.

Much in the same way that research has shown (pretty conclusively) that exposing yourself to violent television over and over again makes you more violent and less concerned with violence happening around you.

Do these ads really seem like they would perform worse than typical banner ads? You're right that accidental clicks may happen more often, but you don't pay per click. You said that "nobody wants them, everybody ignores them", which can be said about any kind of display advertising if you don't like advertising. At the end of the day, an ad campaign can be a smash hit with click-through as low as 1%, or even lower depending on what you're selling.

Funnily enough, MailOnline had the same problem and also implemented VPAID for VideoJS

https://github.com/MailOnline/videojs-vast-vpaid

I really hoped that the Guardian and others were going to create their own safer (no pron/malware) and faster (less RTB) network and cut out much of the cruft when I read about Pangaea last year. Looks like it's more about sharing data though :(

http://pangaeaalliance.com/

I work in industry, and while I haven't explored the Guardian's player, I do use MailOnline's plugins extensively, and they work better than any other tester I've found. Fantastic stuff, and its open source.

Thanks for sharing this. May I ask, did anyone tried to talk to the management about the long term effects of this?

Long term = people will eventually learn to avoid your site because BBC feels much more responsive.

We spent a lot of time talking about that balance. The thing to remember is that these conversations are happening in the context of an industry that's in structural decline. You have ever lower print revenues, and Facebook and Google taking 80%+ of the spend that's moving to digital. And then you have a sales culture incentivised on short-term outcomes. In that environment it becomes really hard to turn down a buck.

My two cents right now would be that consumer revenues (people paying you directly) is probably the only way to run a profitable generalist news company. That, or have the backing of a nation state (BBC) or philanthropic institution. If you want to run a business from ads on the internet, you need a great case for why you're a better option than Facebook, and most news companies just can't make that case.

I've actually emailed the Guardian before to say I would gladly pay at least whatever they earn from my ad impressions to have an ad-free site. They just pointed me to the mobile apps where this is already an option.

I wish more sites offered an alternative to the dilemma of UX-breaking ads vs ad blocker guilt.

You can pay them $49/year. If that doesn't remove the ads, then install an ad blocker that you turn on for just their site.

https://membership.theguardian.com/us/supporter?INTCMP=ADBLO...

The idea of paying them then paying someone else to remove their shit is a little insane. Until that is resolved, I pay for my ad blockers. The added bonus is that I can remove any content I don't like (lifestyle stories about our rugby players).

Ad blocker guilt? Never felt that.

Seriously, how did you (and everyone else) end up in this mess?

Imagine your printed edition where your editors have no idea what sort of ads are printed in your paper, because it's all added at the printing firm by some shady characters.

The short answer is that online advertising pays very little compared to print advertising. Obtrusive video advertising pays slightly more.

You might say that such advertising is losing in the long run because it's alienating users, and you'd be right. But when you balance sheet shows a precipitous decline month on month as your print readers convert to online ones, you don't have many other options to keep investors happy.

It already is that way to some extent.

Not every newspaper has the same ad setup. Ads are added at printing and are still targeted to the best of the publishing companies ability.

Feel your pain. Worked on a video player at a previous company.

Advertising was the biggest pain point.

The fun part is when the ad trafficker would run a VPAID payload with 18 sequential ad-auction vendors. We saw delay from first byte of the player to first byte of the advertisement go from Xms on a fast connection to > 30 seconds.

And then they blamed the player for being slow \o/

They will have to solve it by next year, because Chrome will stop activating Flash by default.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/15/11679394/chrome-to-block-f...

You worked on the newer Video Player for the Guardian? Coincidently I created the really old one built in Flash, never had too many bugs though since most of the work was already done with the Flash framework. Just visual stuff going all over the place.

As part of the R&R project?

I half won and then firmly lost a project around then to port their video serving to our web tv platform.

Lost due to severe inability to manage such a project but we had a nice multi-format video player for the time: js abstraction over different players for different platforms (flash, quicktime, windows media, ...).

And in doing so made something that doesn't work with the most recent browser on my phone. And breaks in a very annoying way.

https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625

> Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.

indeed. rule of thumb: every intermediary is a potential disintermediary (see Google, Apple etc)

bright side: or acquirer!

keep in mind that the alternative for flash is downloading a script from who knows where and running it on the same scope as the page. for each ad.

it is the exact same thing. No matter if they moved away from flash or not. they still would have full control of your site and be able to do what they want just the same. They only have to copy and paste javascript instead of actionscript.

Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.

Incidentally, your (The Guardian) android app is very slow to load, it's annoying enough that I uninstalled it.

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