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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

It seems that the problem is people have different reactions to ads. Some want no ads at all, some don't mind ads as such, but are wary of ads with heavy js and video payloads that cause slowdowns and are potentially malign. There doesn't seem to be a good solution that allows the user to easily modulate what they'll accept.

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Don't forget all the tracking and the profiling.

They hardly ask your consent for that.

I really wouldn't feel bad about any adblocking.

And for anyone that wants to run ads : just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

> And for anyone that wants to run ads : just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

I thought so too. Once you reach a certain size, even 1st party ads get blocked.

Yeah, but...

> Once you reach a certain size

Top 5 annoying ads of all time for me are autoplaying Youtube ads -- which I would think would be self-hosted.

> just serve them locally in a sufficient format and you'll slip through blocks.

In what universe do you live? Every little forum that self-hosts ads is already in the blocklists.

Advertisers want require that ads are served from a 3rd party server for attribution.

An added complication is that one party will buy ad space from Google, and then turn around and sell it on to another party that may put up quite different ads from what was initially claimed.

I always thought The Deck[1] seemed to achieve a good balance. It was trivial to whitelist them, and I had no qualms in doing so. Too bad it apparently wasn't sustainable...

[1]: http://decknetwork.net/

Carbon (https://carbonads.net/) seems to be going strong.

non-tracking ad networks are pretty niche, you're basically trading revenue for aesthetics.

I have carbon on one of my projects and get 100 clicks on 60k views for $0.95CPC - I think adsense could easily double that revenue but at the cost of more intrusive tracking ads - not really worth it for a side project but I'd be tempted to switch if I had a bit more traffic.

What does your site provide - does it sell any products or services or is it purely ad supported? If it’s ad supported and you don’t care about your brand I’d say there’s no risk in switching to shittier ads, but if you want to keep a quality brand or have other services you sell, be careful as shitty ads could put off potential paying customers making it not worth it in the long-term.

The advantage of Carbon (or any other quality ad network like The Deck) is that the ads don’t really look like ads, so you can use them pretty much anywhere without degrading the UX and getting essentially free money. It might be not much but it’s still free money in exchange for a minimal change in the UX. Nasty ads might pay more but would degrade the experience so much I would no longer consider it “free” money no matter how much they’re paying.

Ad blockers are good enough, I think.

I run an ad network that serves ads server<->server (I just wrote up how it works[1] for someone else) and I suspect this approach will become more popular to cover the people who "don't mind ads as such".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17000756

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