Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

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> You sell cast iron skillets, I'm a food blogger. You want some ad space. Email me and send me a check.

This totally works, but does have some drawbacks:

* High friction. The advertiser needs to seek out sites, send emails back-and-forth, agree on pricing, etc.

* Cheating. How does the advertiser know that their ad is really being shown? How do they know that the publisher really has lots of visitors, and isn't just sending them back traffic?

* Lower payments. Unless you're writing about something where people spend a lot of money (insurance bloggers, etc) you'll likely make more money if you use something that supports personalization.

The way this works out is big publishers (all the brands you've heard of) make direct deals with big advertisers, but (a) they still make a substantial portion of their money by first checking whether there's a high bid from a network and (b) they integrate various vendors to verify the traffic is legitimate.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Thank for the disclosure.

1. Are there legitimate safe spaces for people who like friction? Or are they only for people who LARP as Don Draper and Jordan Belfort?

2. How was/is cheating in this sense addressed in print advertisements?

3. This makes sense, but I think the alternative would call for more friction and ethical data collection/sharing on behalf of personalization.

4. The last sentence was the most helpful. Who is the "network" in question?

(Now for my disclosure: If you can't tell I need to sit down and figure out how the online ad business actually works, I likely can count on my hands many times I've ever clicked an ad online and I've definitely purchased something in that manner far less if ever).

Thank you!

1: I don't think it's very common. I have a blogger friend who used to host simple image ads, but then they migrated to substack.

2: The primary method of cheating in print was lying about your circulation numbers. Anyone could easily verify that the ad was run in the agreed on spot, but the question of how many people read your paper/magazine is harder. In the US circulation numbers typically come from the nonprofit Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulation). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation

3: The world is moving in that direction, but not especially because advertisers or publishers are pushing for it. Instead it's consumer advocacy groups and browsers. My primary project at work right now is (along with a lot of other people) figuring out how we can serve personalized ads without cross-site tracking (https://github.com/WICG/turtledove).

4: An ad network is a middleman between advertisers and publishers. Directly connecting pairs of publishers (P) and advertisers (A) scales at O(PA) while publishers and advertisers both connecting to a network scales at O(P+A). AdSense would be an example: an advertiser who signs up with AdSense can advertise across all its publishers without needing to make 1:1 deals.

(Still speaking only for myself)

Thank you, Jeff.

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