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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Third parties are necessary in advertising for this reason.

If ads were served by the publisher than the advertiser would always think that the publisher was cheating and claiming they showed more impressions and generated more clicks.

If ads were server by the advertiser then the publisher would always think that the advertiser was cheating and claiming that they showed fewer impressions and got fewer clicks.

Both could believe that a third party is honest. Both will feel even more assured if the site has 50 different trackers from 50 different third parties tracking the process.

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That does make sense and I hadn't thought of that. But considering the huge portion of internet users with adblock enabled, wouldn't it make sense for the advertiser, publisher and third party to collaborate on a system installed on the publisher's servers that the third party verifies is an accurate metric? Or maybe the naysayers are correct that the whole ad tech universe could never and will never work and is doomed?

This exists, but is rare and only for larger players. At the end of the day, if the end user can identify the DOM slot the ad goes into, it gets blocked either way. It'll forever be a cat and mouse game.

Yup this is sometimes done, where the third party stuff is served out of a first party subdomain instead of a third party domain. It's still uncommon except in the big publishers because it requires more effort to do the integration.

The topic of "accurate metric" is also challenging. When I worked on this, I would often find discrepancies of up to 5% depending on the technical implementation of the metric. There was never a clear explanation, just that the sequence of events from mouseover to click to redirect to more redirects to the final landing looked more like a very wide funnel with leaky correlation than the straight pipeline you might naively assume.

That doesn't make sense for Youtube videos? Unless Alphabet doesn't trust itself?

Google has to be careful for how it treads for anti-trust reasons.

For instance Google has a blocker for "annoying ads" in Chrome. Needless to say it is never going to block an annoying ad that is served by Google. The whole thing is asking for a lawsuit.

If Google is aggressive against adblockers it similarly becomes a target in a way it would be if there were 4 major players that each got 20% of the market and then a bunch of small players.

The most interesting thing happening in online advertising today is the pitch made by the video or podcast creator that is embedded in the content. I've got an emotional connection with Nate Silver or Ana Psychology that makes me more responsive to their pitch than the average pre-roll.

> The most interesting thing happening in online advertising today is the pitch made by the video or podcast creator that is embedded in the content.

Harder to block, so I manually skip it...

There are browser ad-on that block sponsored content. Having said so, there are a few channels that provide pretty great content without sponsored pitches or with relevant pitches that might be ok-ish.

You might want to look at sponsorblock. It allows you to annotate sponsored segments, and will automatically skip them. Of course you'll also get the benefit of other users annotating so in my experience it skips just about all sponsored segments without having to do anything.

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