This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.
More directly though, I find organic advertising (sponsorships, author recommendations and reviews, etc) to just be more effective when the site can pull them off correctly. Kotaku's deals section, for example, is consistently lovely and makes it right through my ad blocker. I'll even click it on purpose from time to time, because I value their curation and it's usually all stuff that most gamers would be interested in anyway. I don't think all advertising is bad, but the third-party iframe "drop it on the page and forget" nonsense has got to go.
Granted, that only works because he has an established enough audience that he can have sponsors come a-courting. But that's the difference between building an audience and trawling for traffic.
Josh Marshall runs Talking Points Memo largely on subscriptions, with ad revenue as a supplement. He wrote an entire article about how he prefers to keep his day-to-day expenses for the year paid through reliable funding streams like subscriptions and using more variable sources, like ad revenue, to support investments for future growth, capital investment, etc. I think he prefers to not feel over-a-barrel to advertisers or traffic as well, just out of a sense of journalistic integrity.
The problem is the big guys can do this easily, but e.g. someone running a blog cannot easily serve ads from the server.
Ad networks are about ad auction and showing the highest paying available ads for a site. Client side ad solutions makes this easy for the little guy, because ad selection is done on the client by the ad network.
The big players (facebook, etc.) can easily alter their methods or require subscription if necessary. It's not so easy for the little guy, so a change of the current model without offering a similarly effective alternative is going to kill many little sites, blogs, forums, while the big players will keep thriving regardless.
Does this render them immune to malvertising? As you imply, it by no means does so. You're completely correct. It might, however, reduce the chances by a non-zero amount as compared to a third party executing arbitrary code in their client as blessed by you.
But, none of that is important. I think the most important lesson here is that nobody has a right to a given business model. No website, big or small, has a fundamental right to generate revenue based on advertising. Advertising may be essential to some business models, but those business models are not essential to anything.
What? Who's talking about rights here? Especially to a business model? That's a strange interpretation and companies are free to do what they want. Advertising is itself a business model, and marketing (of which advertising is a subset) is critical to the commercial success of pretty much every corporation that exists.
The biggest issue with directly negotiated ad campaigns is scale. Unless you are a major publisher, no advertiser is going to spend time dealing with small buys across multiple small sites, which is the whole point of small sites using ad networks that can aggregate and streamline demand and optimize yield. Also much of that 3rd party javascript is for measurement. Digital ads require accurate metrics and the industry won't be going back to blind buys with no visibility and only the publishers promise.
You are absolutely correct! Companies are free to do as they see fit. And consumers are free to do things like block ads or not engage with publishers as they see fit.
I've run content sites that ran on advertising. I've negotiated with advertisers. I deeply, genuinely understand the value ad networks provide to publishers.
As a consumer, and as an responsible professional software engineer, I am also concerned with the privacy practices and abuse enabled by many third-party inclusions. More than one website has been compromised by such things.
If buyers choose not to do direct buys, then publishers wish to consider the possibilities that could be realized with a different model that doesn't hinge on being cavalier with user privacy and security.
No commercial internet publisher has a right to exist. No commercial internet publisher has a right to derive revenue from abusing their users. Users, on the other hand, have in the eyes of some basic rights to security and privacy. As opposed to the desire of marketing to use a fifth shitty third-party tracker.
You're right. Publishers and advertisers are free to do as they wish. They just might want to consider showing some respect for users is all.
Small sites do not make big money.
https://www.wired.com/2010/12/doubleclick/
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062867/overlay-malware-google-a...
But the topic was smaller sites running 3rd party networks which necessarily only integrate via client-side JS. That has nothing to do with what kind of ads are being run. It's the same exact ad calls to the ad exchanges, just done via HTTP from the server rather than JS in the browser.
Or do you have to just get a bit of paper from the ad network saying they won't make any mistakes, then take their word for it without any way of auditing their claim?
There is an entire inner industry around security and malware for programmatic ads, with a few companies that are pretty good at it, but it is not something that can just run as a simple server for any small publisher to deploy.
Can you name them? The major ones have had persistent failures which make me think this is more due to not being targeted or being some of the niche networks like The Deck which didn’t have capacity to scale up.
The big sites, facebook and co. can easily do some curation and find advertisers, so as it was mentioned before these changes would only eliminate the small players while further concentrating the web into the hands of the big guys.
If the answer is no then there must be a feasible, scalable alternative for small players before we eliminate the current ad based model, otherwise the little guys will die and all we have will be huge media sites pushing their own agendas without small, independent publishers having a chance of standing up to them.
That is the dilemma.
Herein lies the catch: you have correctly and properly identified a potential side-effect.
The question, I think, is this: how many users and how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for this precious, wonderful, beloved, amazing side-effect? I know my answer, and I see no dilemma at all.
The horrific outcome you so rightly point to is not an ideal outcome, in isolation. At the same time, there's never a guarantee that there must be some convenient alternative. The wish for a thing does not conjure it into being, or even prove that it is possible. And in this case, some might decide that our beloved side-effect isn't as important as some other things.
Though I understand if some prefer to see the security and privacy of users as something to be traded off against for financial convenience.
So there must be a tradeoff if we wan't privacy, but we also want to have publishing outlets independent of big corporations. There is currently no perfect solution where we can have total privacy and also little publishers can sustain themselves.
I'm saying that we must find a balance where we have some of both. Having 100% of one while giving up the other is not the answer.
I understand why you feel that way. A diversity of voices is critically important for our society! These are the people who hold the powerful to account, who give voice to the voiceless. Their continued existence, as a group, are essential to a functioning modern democracy. We need to have them. You are absolutely, completely right about their importance!
> So there must be a tradeoff if we wan't privacy, but we also want to have publishing outlets independent of big corporations. There is currently no perfect solution where we can have total privacy and also little publishers can sustain themselves.
I understand why you believe this. At the same time, it strikes me as perhaps excessively entrenched in extant business models and takes on faith that there can be no other approaches.
Right now, I think you will find that a substantial portion of the public agrees with you. A balance, a set of tradeoffs, around privacy and online advertising can and must be found. The popular balance is likely to be the one of privacy first, and advertising just has to suck it up. Which, while a balance, is clearly not the one you want.
> Having 100% of one while giving up the other is not the answer.
I understand why you feel this way. Having a diversity of voices, large and small, independent and otherwise is very important! It's worth bearing in mind that not everyone is likely to want to be required to surrender their personal privacy for your notion of viewpoint diversity in publishers. After all, whatever balance is struck will apply to large corporations just as readily as small, scrappy, alternative, independent voices.
It's definitely worth considering that alternatives that do not set up a conflict between user privacy and revenue may be possible. There is genuine innovation going on in this area, as well as age-old subscription models - and people like me can and do have subscriptions. I, personally, maintain several.
As for those who don't adapt... well. My heart goes out to them. But my wallet does not.
Every publisher can enjoy the tech provided by Google, and participate in gaining money from this system, relative to it's popularity.
So what we see is that small players within the ad-tech business are dying, while bigger players (Google, Facebook) can not only adapt to the law, but also help writing the law.
So a hypothetical switch to first-party/server side ads won't have a negative effect on small blogs, because they can simply chose Google as their ad partner, which will create the necessary solutions.
The only advantage big publishers have over small publishers is that it's easier to scale the extraction of money from 10 million visitors, compared to 10,000 visitors.
With client side ad serving the ad serving network can be very fast, because google, etc. provides the cdn for this.
If it is done on the server side then when loading the page the server will have to do additional remote network calls to retrieve the ads from google servers, so the page will be slower to respond. Also, smaller sites usually run on budget hosting which often limit resources and having to do additonal remote network fetches when assembling the page can very easily run into some server side limit.
So server side ad serving for little sites can have a significant impact on server response time which is not an issue with the current model.
CDN's can help with this somewhat, but a server-to-server network connection will still always be better and faster.
I don't accept that premise (see first comment on page)
Self hosted unobtrusive ads without tracking? Yes I will disable ublock. But it won't happen because tracking simply makes too much $€¥.
How so? it still needs to be downloaded to the browser, and integrated with the content the use actually wants to see.
If it was hosted by the same server that produces the content, then it would be harder though not impossible to block. It would also be harder to just mass block like you can at the moment. You would need to block for individual sites by targeting the div class name that they use.
I have some ideas about what you might mean (improve page load time, prevent content from jumping as ads load), but curious about what you think.
It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.