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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

There are only two ways to break the duopoly: create your own massive medium like Facebook or work with publishers. Having worked in this industry, I think working with publishers is an impossible battle. The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate attempts to increase page views.

Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometimes I wonder how could this even be a profitable proposition for advertisers. This is one reason why Google absolutely dominates the space. It has the capability to deal with all the fraud, calculate the right reward for publishers, and give a meaningful ROI to the advertiser.

Maybe a new kind of advertisement medium could unseat Google from its dominance but the way digital advertising works today, it sounds like an impossible idea.

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My site https://officesnapshots.com doesn’t really fit into either of those molds.

We sell our own advertising space, self-host it, and use static jpgs for the graphics.

The ads are also targeted against the content (office design) and tend to be for products like office furniture. In a roundabout way this targets the readers but only because if they are on the site they are likely interested in learning about new products in their field.

Do you track things like viewability? Why not use something like an adserver?

What true value do either of those provide?

It provides better observability on what's actually going on with your ads, and allows for an advertiser to buy based on available inventory (e.g. # of impressions) rather than a date range.

I'd like to see an industry by which companies or their advertising reps engage with sites in a subscription-like mechanism for direct advertising. Cutting out the middleman seems like a logical step in this day and age.

How would advertisers know which sites have most users of their target group? This is the kind of problem that Google solved for them.

Subscription to ads would mean a lot of waste in the budget. Very few advertisers would go for that over CPC/CPA pricing

It's not subscription to ads, it's advertisers subscribing themselves into sites.

Look at Pinterest, Twitter, Nextdoor, SnapChat etc - there are a generation of new advertising and content machines that are being built in different verticals as we speak. Ultimately, they'll hold all the distribution power across different contexts. I wonder what kind of publisher this kind of world incentivizes.

just a couple counter examples I wanted to point out:

giantbomb.com (ads + subscription only content) 4chan (I would like someone to explain it more deeply to me, but I think they run their own ads, do they use an outside service?)

4Chan’s ads are purchased mostly by users of the site and generally end up pointing back at other boards on 4Chan itself, accompanied by some site relevant image. For a long time there were also occasionally ads for J-List (an importer and seller of Japanese drinks, foods, toys etc.) which was a direct purchaser of ad space from the site itself.

Having users pay for ads instead of third parties keeps it quite neat and generally quite safe, but I don’t think 4Chan itself is profitable.

Native ads. Match that up with content creator networks

That's just a format, it doesn't solve anything else. It can still be poor quality, misleading scams, more numerous than the content and there are plenty of "native" networks like Teads that only do intrusive video advertising while claiming to be native.

This is what Toutiao is.

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