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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

Wild speculation: What if cutting off the ad exchanges was a dose of quinine for the New York Times?

NYT is a premium venue for people who want to advertise, because its regular readers (especially the ones who don't live in New York) tend to have above-average disposable income. Because of that, the NYT should be able to charge a premium for advertising with them.

But if they opt into the ad exchanges, then they've given ad exchanges a signal they can use to more easily track who is a regular NYT reader. Advertisers could use that to target NYT readers without ever actually advertising on the NYT's website - they can follow them somewhere cheaper, and advertise there instead.

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I'm not clear how that would work. How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?

> How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?

tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to profile its audience, then use that profile to target the same audience on cheaper sites.

I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running "research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target that same audience on low-quality sites.

So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages clickbait and memes in its place.

This used to be possible but every reputable publisher and exchange doesn't allow it anymore, mostly for this reason.

I thought part of the problem with the ad exchanges was that they're very hard to police, so what they officially don't allow has limited bearing on what actually happens.

Typically an ad will go through multiple vendors (dsp, exchange, ssp, ssp, etc) and then to the publisher. One of these will catch it, and if not a publisher as big as NYT has tools in place to catch it.

But yes things can slip through, but its mostly unapproved creative (gambling, etc) rather than code which is easy to catch.

Set the cookie then buy those users later on other cheaper inventory. It's been done for years and entire trade groups like DCN try to battle against it. Nowadays its insider trading with DMPs and data connectors that share ids and segments.

JS injection into display ads, which happens a lot more often than you would think when it comes to ad display network content.

Yeah, no it doesn't. I ran supply side programmatic for years and run buy side now. That is not true.

What isn't true? That JS is everywhere in ads?

So mobile redirects just happen because of magick?

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