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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B's pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn't want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented.

"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.

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Which reveals a problematic truth. The tracking is worth more than getting rid of ad blocking.

Or some amount of well-targeted advertising is worth more than a larger amount of poorly-targeted advertising.

Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim?

Thanks!

If you search for the terms "real time bidding" and "ad exchange", you will find a lot of literature on how it works. The explanation and the technical underpinnings are a bit involved, which is why I'm not just outright explaining here, but you will find explanations pretty readily.

If you poke around AppNexus, you will find what you are looking for. The process is basically: a visitor comes to the site, each connected ad network/buyer has 100ms to provide a bid, the top bidder wins.

What happens with ad blocking visitors? They never become a visitor to bid for?

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.

> 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.

https://adnauseam.io/

Yeah I don't really think the idea of cheating any further (i.e. fake-clicking the ad) is necessary. I just want to appear like a regular ad-viewing browser that doesn't click ads.

So like your IP, browser version, plugins installed etc etc get leaked to 100s of connected buyers? How is that even remotely legal in certain EU countries?

There used to be a great article on Searchengineland about it but I can't find it now. And it was originally patented by GoTo[1] and Google was sued by Overture[2] with mixed results[3]. It did give Yahoo! which owned Overture at the time some Google stock (2.7M shares).[4] (Which, interestingly enough, if they had held would be worth more than $2B today)

[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...

The ad auctions that happen on Google (and Yahoo etc) are a simpler version of what happens on the web since there's only one publisher (i.e Google) and a single 'ad network' (i.e. AdWords).

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/

I am constrained by the non-disclosure I signed when I left Google from disclosing how I know this, but I know that the auctions on Google are "not a simpler version" :-).

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.

AppNexus[0] used to provide RTB to many networks in 2011, including Google and Facebook. Isn't that still the case?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppNexus

It's called Real Time Bidding. It gets very complicated, and performance is usually priority #1.

>performance is usually priority #1.

Not usually. Stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids is something usual

The proxy suggestion seems to have merit though, it would still give advertisers the ability to run auctions, track users and ad views, etc, while avoiding domain filtering.

OTOH I suspect ad blockers would adapt quickly... it's not clear it would be worth the investment to set up.

They wouldn't be able to track users across publishers and through to their conversion pages.

It would generally stop advertisers from being able to verify ad impression, or to correlate users across sites. killing the most successful advertising whale (retargeting) in the process.

Why is that?

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?

> site showing the ads could easily fake

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.

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

So what happens when ads are being blocked? Does the real-time auction still occur?

No, usually the ad blockers will block the SSP's script which (depending on implementation) is either responsible for managing the auction, or calling a server which manages the auction. In theory it's possible for the adblocked to miss the SSP but block the eventual winner of the auction and at least on the demand side, we don't pay out for the lack of an impression (not sure of the terms between SSPs and publisher as to which of the two end up eating the lost opportunity, but I suspect the SSP's push it back to the publisher)

Offtopic: The website in your profile http://encona.com/ seems to be down.

Pro tip: not all domain names have an associated website. Mine neither.

Yeah, but they usually have a DNS record. Which, encona.com does. text and MX, just no A or CNAME.

An MX record perhaps.

If I understand correctly, I don't think an A record is necessary if you're just using the domain for email.

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

Yep, that's correct.

Pro pro tip, it did at one point ;-)

https://web.archive.org/web/20150925213001/encona.com/

Haha, yes it did. But it had little traffic and what little useful information it contained is mostly out of date.

Encona is also a very popular and in my opinion delicious brand of hot spicy sauces in the UK.

Yup. I live in China now, so bring back a few bottles of Encona's 'original' hot pepper sauce on each visit to the UK.

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