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Comment by kakarot | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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

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?

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

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