In terms of technical details, I request that the publisher send me:
- How many ads they want on the page
- The client IP address (at least within a /20 of it)
- The client user agent (they can strip hex/numbers at the end that are added by some US-based Internet providers)
- Some keywords/topics (if they want contextually-targeted ads)
- A cookie they have dropped for the purposes of ad retargeting/blocking if they've obtained a preference from the user to do so.
In return, I send them a list of objects containing:
+ a title for the ad (supplied by the advertiser), no HTML permitted
+ a "description" for text ads (also supplied by the advertiser). <a> and <b> tags permitted, but no other HTML.
+ an image for the ad (also supplied by the advertiser) delivered as a data URI. I verify that it's actually an image (jpeg or png)
+ a "click through url" that points at a domain that the publisher has given me (usually something like ads.mysite.com) that I host -- they have to point the NS for this domain at my name servers
+ a preference url that indicates that the user didn't like this ad. This can be called server-to-server.
I still believe in content sponsorship, even though some mega-ad networks like Google have screwed publishers and consumers hard, and it's nice to see moderated consumer views here: There's a lot of people on HN against any form of advertising on the grounds of some kind of "eyeball rape"