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Comment by HugThem | Hacker News Reader

He seems to not show how the ads looked like on his page. He seems to only attribute it to load time. But maybe the ads were visually annoying? Why no screenshots?

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I have adblock so I don't usually see them and didn't make a point of screenshotting them. When I did (usually checking in Chromium that some CSS change was working), they were fairly ordinary AdSense ads, IMO. Like on DNB FAQ, they would usually be Lumosity or college ads. They weren't flashing or visually offensive, so I never saw them as a problem.

I looked at some of your pages on archive.org but saw no ads either. Can you give me a hint how to find the pages with the ads?

It was on almost all of the HTML pages (except the index & Modafinil) up to September. Perhaps the JS doesn't run when loaded from IA or something?

Good question. Even if it does not load, it should still show the adsense code in the html. But looking at some random post, I don't see it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150304235943/http://www.gwern.n...

Adsense is usually a script loaded from googlesyndication.com which is not in the source here.

Maybe archive.org rewrote the html so much that it is not there anymore?

After a few moments of searching I'm going to assume that whoever specifically scraped and uploaded the page may have removed the adsense javascript. Doesn't look to be a normal archive.org thing.

You can upload pages to archive.org? Wouldn't that open the door for spam and other abuse?

I checked some other site and the Adsense code is not changed by archive.org. So something is strange.

Maybe Gwern experimented with different types of ads and on that page at that time did not use adsense?

I do see the adsense code in a snapshot from a year later:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160629230243/https://www.gwern....

I am yet to see any ad setup that guarantees they are not visually annoying. Most (reputable) ad networks guarantee they filter ads and remove the evil ones. I haven't seen one that delivered. I do not see how they could - manual review of each ad is not scalable and advertisers would not abide by it, they'd just move to network with less stringent rules.

I believe Project Wonderful is the closest thing I know - it's a manually-reviewed ad network used for webcomics, with the downside that it's accordingly much less valuable for site owners.

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