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Comment by w1nst0nsm1th | Hacker News Reader

It's not related to the actual article but the footnote about advertisment is what strike me the most :

> Advertising revenue is falling fast across the Internet, and independently-run sites like Ghacks are hit hardest by it. The advertising model in its current form is coming to an end, and we have to find other ways to continue operating this site.

It's no wonder Google is pushing to remove (partially) the ability to block ads in Chrome. If the business model based on ads is seriously at stake, a big chunk of the revenues of Alphabet is compromised.

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To me the absurd thing is that this site could probably just embed ads as if they were normal website elements and not hosted by some ad CDN with lots of Javascript. As long as the ads weren't terrible, I doubt visitors would go to the effort of manually blocking the elements.

But that fundamentally breaks the absolute fraud and house of cards of the entire web ad industry and make layers of ad people obsolete so it won't happen.

It feels a lot like cable companies: "Our model is absolute shit but we don't need to change, you do." It's why I'm completely unsympathetic to the pending death of the cable and ad industries. They both were in a Sears position to dominate whatever paradigms come next.

Not to defend the current model, but it's a lot more complicated than "just embed ads". Where do they get the ads from? How do they handle charging for them? How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc.

The whole model with ads on the internet and the related tracking and profiling of everyone's activity is just terrible. But it's also going to take a lot to replace it with something less bad.

I do kind of agree. But I think that can be a process and tooling problem that can be solved in numerous ways that don't involve handing over the keys to those blocks to the ad industry.

I do kind of disagree. I don't think it needs to be a lot more complicated. I just think the industry kept growing to a point that it needed to justify complexity. There's entire categories of jobs that don't need to exist.

Consider how advertising works for YouTube sponsorship. It's literally just some person emailing another person saying, "hey I've seen your site and based on a bit of research (the thing that justifies my jobs existence) I think your personality and demographic and other factors are all a match for advertising this product. Want to talk about it more?" And then the advertising agency hands over a package for the YouTuber to fit into their channel in an organic, appropriate way. Why oh why is that so hard for the web ad industry to do? Let's hash out the details, and then our guys will send your guys some html and other assets and you can plug it in to run for a month, using whatever technical architecture you use to run ads.

300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded every minute. Assuming that the average video is 2x the minimum required to maximize ad revenue (10 min so 20 min per) that is 25 videos per second. Assuming you can do a deal every 10 minutes you would need 630 people to get ads for 1% of the videos uploaded.

The entire point of that complicated web is to eliminate the cost of all those people and move that 0.1% that you could actually do to closer to 80%.

While it is true that we have given too much power to advertisers the solutions to the privacy problems that solve the advertisers requirements is hard (remember they are the only ones paying into the system so dropping their requirements won't happen). There have been some technical papers put forward but they are as complex as BitCoin is in order to actually allow for a small subset of the features the terrible leaky privacy of the modern web gives them for no effort.

> How does the advertiser know they're not being ripped off, reaching their target demo, etc.

The same way print ads have worked for ... centuries?

Print ads have worked for centuries.

Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

But do they need to?

No, not really. All they need to know is the source of their traffic and how well it's converting. That source isn't paying for itself? Cut it and divert the budget to one that is.

Does advertising needs to exist at all? Do businesses need to exist at all? Does economy needs to exist?

There're issues with current state of online advertising, but when was last time humanity said "improving this would be a great business, but you know what - we don't want it to be better"?

Personally, I only ever go to Harbor Freight when they send out mailers- not because I can't spend money other times, but because their mailers are such a constant thing that it doesn't make sense to buy it not on sale.

> There're issues with current state of online advertising, but when was last time humanity said "improving this would be a great business, but you know what - we don't want it to be better"?

When you externalize costs like this anything is easy to justify, I will ask a different way: should we be reconsidering forcing the costs of adtech's growth in to an engaged panopticon on to society? Do ads need to be 1000 times more efficient (and profitable, if Alphabet and Facebook's quarterly reports are to be believed) if they have so many external costs which the ecosystem is simply unfit to solve itself?

> Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

In what way could they possibly work 1000 times (or, ignoring the hyperbole) 10x or even 2x better?

They don’t magically grant consumers more money to spend on goods and services.

It’s a zero-sum game in which companies compete in advertising budgets, instead of producing better cheaper products.

Print ads are not targeted--they can only be targeted to the text they accompany. This means that the vast majority of their viewers are completely uninterested in the ad, while a viewer who might be interested in an ad that shows in another print item, does not see that ad because they do not subscribe to that print item. Digitization allows for ads to be switched on-the-fly, so no matter that media you consume, you see ads relevant to you. This vastly increases the success rate of the ads. It doesn't seem like much, because even targeted ads have an incredibly low success rate, but there's a huge difference between 0.0001% and 0.01%.

> Print ads are not targeted--they can only be targeted to the text they accompany. This means that the vast majority of their viewers are completely uninterested in the ad

So if I'm reading a review of a new car for example, and there's a full page ad for the new Ford Focus alongside it, I'm not going to be interested? Seems more relevant than constantly being bombarded with ads for mattresses after buying one 6 months ago.

> Digital ads with analytics work 1000 times better.

Have you compared the ROI between the two? Why would anyone bother with print ads at all if this was the case?

> Have you compared the ROI between the two? Why would anyone bother with print ads at all if this was the case

They mostly don't, hence why businesses dependent on print ads have had to radically reinvent themselves or die.

As others said the whole functionality can be implemented server side, and you can serve it as part of the HTML.

Or simply reverse proxy it and put that in an IFRAME (or use JS and lazy load it into a DIV).

The current problem is that every ad engine tracks everything they touch. Instead of tracking how well a particular ad performs on a given site. (Of course ad engines try to show ads that are relevant to the profile they built up, but since the hit rate is extremely low, most of it is just noise. Which is very annoying.)

To solve the self-reporting trust issues make the sites report each impression separately with some proxied meta data. (Which is equivalent to always reverse proxy-ing.)

Which would be a bit slower than today (because most sites are not CDNes around the world, but most ad engines are), but who cares, the megabytes of shit downloaded and running on each site slows down UX more.

Not that I necessarily disagree, but I think there's a bit of leap between ghack's footnote and assumptions about Google's behavior.

One could leap to the assumption that ghack's target demographic are more likely to embrace ad-blockers, which is why they're being hit hard.

The proportion of Google’s ad revenue coming from ads displayed on Google properties keeps growing.

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