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Comment by xurukefi | Hacker News Reader

I always found it puzzling that DNS blacklisting for adblocking purposes works at all. I mean I'm not a webdev or anything like that, so what I'm saying might be a bit native, but couldn't you simply serve your ads using the same domain you use for your content? This immediately defeats things like PiHole completely.

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It's related to how the internet ad market has evolved. Initially, sites would run their advertising side kind of like newspapers do - have in-house departments to sell ads directly to the companies that want to advertise, then place the ads on their pages manually and serve them from the same servers. It works, but it's a ton of overhead to have all those ad sales people and find companies one at a time willing to set up a direct relationship with your site and deal with direct billing etc.

It was kind of a revolution to set up these advertising middlemen. Site owners just sign up to show ads and set up their site to load an ad from the ad company's server. Advertisers buy their ad time from the middlemen too. Nobody has to maintain those high-overhead direct relationships. Huge boon for the little-guy sites on both sides. That's the good part. There's plenty of bad parts too, including monopolization of the market, abuse, poor behavior of anti-abuse mechanisms, etc. It's what we've got though, until somebody comes up with something better.

Sadly that is already happening, luckily there are ways to defeat cname cloaking.

https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/04/characterizing-cname-cloak...

This has been happening for a century with first-party advertisements and "sponsored content" that is baked into the content being consumed.

To me it really sounds like trivial to serve adds from exactly the same address and even full URL as the content. Then again maybe adblocking isn't yet having such big effect that companies want to do that.

There's no honour among thieves and whatnot; advertisers do not trust publishers to report data or log impressions truthfully without money-signs-on-bags running away with stolen money.

Which, honestly, will 100% happen, considering the sheer amount of weird "adsense click fraud rings" you can find on the shitty, awful part of the internet, like SEO forums.

There isn't one "you" here, there's two: the website and the advertiser.

They don't trust each other; each has an incentive to defraud the other.

That's why they run separate servers. Auditability.

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