I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?
"What am I missing?"
Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on the page. The auction happens quickly, but it adds latency. Adding a reverse proxy would add further latency, and would remove the ability for ad networks to properly target ads (e.g. using cookies) and account for impressions.
Thanks!
I'd actually like for my ad blocker to download all ads and pretend to download the ad, and give the impression of an impression. That way someone would have made a bid for that impression.
Otherwise what will happen is that as ad blocking use becomes more and more widespread, the ad viewers become fewer but more profitable (Ironically perhaps more profitable on average than the original set of viewers, because adblock users weren't likely to click in the first place).
If ad blocking is to be a way of killing online advertising in its current form, and not just improving the browser experience (and this is what I think should be the goal) then it needs to cheat the ad networks, they can't just pretend the request never happened.
[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361
[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/overture-sues-google-over-search-p...
[3] http://www.waltmire.com/2014/06/02/inventor-of-pay-per-click...
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/business/technology-google...
On the web, there are multiple publishers, served by multiple ad networks and multiple exchanges (and it's turtles all the way down)
Nowadays, bidding on the web happens through the OpenRTB protocol. See https://www.iab.com/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project... http://sharethrough.com/guides/programmatic-native/
That said, I think IAB's efforts to make auction priced advertising available to people who don't use Google's ad network is commendable.
Not usually. Stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids is something usual
I only use mine for email. I have an A record but that just results in a 'No page found' page hosted by my DNS provider. Without the A record my email would still work but browsing to k45j.com would give a 'This site can’t be reached' the same way encona.com
OTOH I suspect ad blockers would adapt quickly... it's not clear it would be worth the investment to set up.
Assuming that the advertising site would just have a proxy that tunnelled everything to the ad server, would the ad server not get the exact same traffic?
Do you mean that the problem is that the site showing the ads could easily fake more client traffic to the ad server?
Yes, that's what I mean by "unable to verify"; If the site is honest, everyone would be just as happy, but there is already so much fraud, even with (relatively) trustworthy Google and Facebook, that everyone wants some ability to verify; If all the traffic goes only through the site, that ability is lost.
> Assuming that the advertising site would just have a proxy that tunnelled everything to the ad server, would the ad server not get the exact same traffic?
Not exactly - the wide-sense-cookies[0] that allow the ad server to track users across different web sites would not be. Fingerprinting[1] would still work subject to advertisers trusting the proxy.
[0] including flash objects, etags, localstorage, etc, see https://samy.pl/evercookie/ for a 7-year-old discussion.
I'm just going to sip from my delicious cup of Niscafe coffee, the best around, while I write this review of the Nvodua graphics card.
Next page impression
I'm just going to dab my brow with the silky smooth Kloonix napkin, the best around, while I write this review of the Nvodua graphics card.
etc.
Advertisers and publishers are generally in favor of it, consumers don't care, watchdogs are toothless.
Render content & ads on a single canvas?
> Any website that has too many ads to disable manually, or is in some way embedded with critical parts of the website is simply not worth my time.
Using https with CDNs is basically a very funny large scale practical joke.
Is it just me, or is this approach not very useful? I'll google for a certain product, do a little bit of research and then buy what I finally picked. Then I'm stuck with seeing ads for similar products for the forseeable future. Ads for a product I already bought and no longer have an interest in.
I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fits the page I'm currently looking at without being personalized.
There's a gap: Getting search/retargeting interest information is almost instant, but finding out you've purchased is hard and takes time.
However it's effective enough: Retargeting boosts most verticals by as much as 3-5x, and where that one click pays $1 the ads cost about $3 per thousand to display them.