The greater problem is that the ad industry is too unregulated and greedy which has led to a tragedy of the commons with malware and poor UX everywhere, leading to adblockers installed by many who otherwise wouldn't mind.
If you want to make sure you get paid for your content, put it behind a paywall. Yes, the number of users will drop, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Otherwise, ask nicely for donations or Patreon support or do old-fashioned sponsored content, obviously with full disclaimers that the content is sponsored, so people can decide whether they want to watch it or not.
Specifically talking about video ads, look at what Glenn Fricker from Spectre Media Group does on his Youtube channel. He often gets demonitized because he tends to swear a lot. So he asks people to "spend a buck, give a fuck" on Patreon, and he does short sponsor midway interludes in his videos. It's always a short clip of himself talking about the product or service in question, and it's always something he uses himself, he won't advertise something he can't vouch for. So you don't get the jarring cuts to some random ad agency's standard BS video that runs on thousands of un-related videos.
That's how to do it. Part of and related to the channel's content, but also clearly demarcated and made fully clear that it is sponsorship/advertising. And most importantly: No tracking!
Devil's Advocate says the people who make your browser reduce 100% to maybe 60%. Browser extensions are the 10%.
On Firefox, with appropriate small changes and with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and a few other add-ons, you bet I can adequately control the data accepted by my browser.
If you use Chrome, well that's another situation. Don't use Chrome.
I posted an example of how advertising could be done in a more sensible way, not a ridiculous claim that Google doesn't track everything they possibly can.
The malware stuff is a cherry on top, but not the main issue.
However I suspect it would be fiendishly difficult to work out the effect over anything other than the immediate short term (i.e. impression to click to sale).
If anyone knows of some good experimental work on this I'd love to read it.
The other part of that is those kinds of ads (dumb ads as you say) are going to be mostly useful for branding. Which is fine when you are Apple or Coke, but if you're a smaller player, you'd rather make sure your ads only get in front of the right eyeballs.
SMBs will only leverage Google, Facebook and other big platforms because I believe they'll have the ability to keep being relevant given their "walled-garden" model despite GDPR-like legal framework.
Every small publisher, aka 99% of them will likely collapse one way or another.
As counter intuitive as it might seem, while this would hurt their bottom line, Google and FB would benefit the most from this.
I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(
That would be great. I think browsers could push this. A simple standard data structure that people volonteer to provide for themselves. If I want "relevant ads" I populate it thuroughly and honestly. If I don't want that, I don't populate it at all, or even ask my browser to randomize it. But info used for targeting it should be info that the browser (i.e. user) provides and not info that the industry scrapes together.
Second: identity. I think step one must be making sure users can't be tracked or fingerprinted. Browser vendors need to make absolutely 100% sure that no font rendering or other fingerprinting can be used.
Obviously point #2 means that point #1 can't be too detailed, or can't be transferred verbatim every time. If you have narrow enough interests you can be fingerprinted.
Ish.
The key problem that made me give in and start blocking is the lack of accountability/responsibility and the fact that one bad player (or hacked player) can affect many sites at once. Too many times I saw drive-by install attempts, camera/mic access attempts, pop-ups/unders, and so forth, on large popular sites via their adverts. imgur.com was one of the worst offenders at the time, and the final straw, but it was far from uncommon elsewhere too. I got tired of the official response being either "yeah, our ad partners had a problem, nothing we could do, it won't happen again, until next time" or simply complete ignorance.
At least with server-side insertion on the site/apps own servers it gives them more control (and forces them to take responsibility). If they serve a malware ridden ad from their own resources then they are responsible, no one else, and had the control to not do it. They are no longer trusting a 3rd party to be safe without having any audit rights to make sure they are. Currently they add JS/iframes/both from the ad provider and have no control over what goes in there. The ad provider is probably a "network" which farms out the content via redirects/other to yet another party, who may include content that they themselves haven't properly checked. There is no practical way to make that safe, but I'm not willing to accept the risk by not blocking the ads. Server-side insertion may be the practical alternative. It doesn't solve all the privacy/tracking issues of course, the site/app can still collect that data and forward it back to the advertiser, but current ad blocking can't stop that anyway and SSAI does take a hit at the malware & UI dark-pattern issues (from their PoV by giving them better control of what their site serves and from our PoV by meaning use of the shitty "it was someone else, our server did nothing" is even less defensible so they have to use that control to be better if they want to be trusted).
Of course there is a problem with this that I'm sure the ad industry will jump on if CSAI becomes problematical: MitM SSAI. The ad network provides a CDN which your viewers connect to instead of you directly and that inserts the advert/tracker/malware/other on the way through. I'll cost them more due to bandwidth requirements, but it would work for sites/apps that aren't massively latency sensitive, and would let them try enforce exclusivity if the method becomes a common one (by refusing to accept or make connections to other MitM SSAI providers they could reduce in-page competition). Though again, to get around SSAI blocking they still have to keep the source close to them, reducing the farming out of responsibility that we currently see.
You're greatly overestimating how much publishers care about security. If they're already willing to embed arbitrary scripts from ad networks (which has full access to the page), why wouldn't they go one step further and proxy it from their servers? It's not like it's giving additional access. I also don't buy the "additional responsibility" aspect. At the end of the day, it's still an ad network, and unless they're manually approving each ad, the risk of malware/scams isn't going to change, and if they happen to display such an ad, they can still deflect blame to the ad network.
Agreed. But it is at least far easier to definitively prove that they are the reason the malware was delivered to a given user. It is perhaps a naive hope, but maybe that and the threat of potential bad publicity (or just being more likely to be included in popular "bad host" block-lists) will encourage a little more due diligence.
> You're greatly overestimating how much publishers care about security.
Oh, my expectations are low. I think more that I'm looking for/at things that might force them to care more than they currently do.