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Comment by myspy | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why websites are not able to find in-house ad solutions that are not provided by third parties. Major sites look like shit due to ads placed without thought or care. This should be handled like magazine or newspaper ads. People selecting and placing them in the page with care. Would result in a better experience and wouldn't require any tracking.

I think that tracking to get "good ads" is a wish that never came true and it needs people with taste to choose products people would like to buy.

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That's because of the silo formation in the advertising market. Agencies want to have an easy time to spend a large budget and they don't want to negotiate individually with thousands of parties. So they do a bulk buy from some large provider which then provides a centralized way to return the statistics. These serve to - somewhat - keep property owners honest because both click fraud and placement fraud would probably be rampant.

Not every kind of advertising is that suspect to fraud but for every budget out there there is some way to siphon it off without giving the advertiser what they were looking for. It's been an arms race between fraudsters and marketeers with the end-users caught in the middle, and between the marketeers and the users with respect to privacy issues. This ruling injects some sanity for those that have declared themselves to be non-combatants.

Youtubers get paid way more for custom in-video ads than they do for the automated ads that Youtube runs before and throughout their videos. If what you said was true then content creators wouldn't be going through the work getting these sponsors and sponsors wouldn't be bothering with the hassle of working with individual content creators.

some youtubers. But compared to overall ad spend on the internet that's a rounding error.

I'm genuinely curious how total ad spend on YouTube compares to total spend direct to influencers. I presume the former is substantially larger, but by how much I have no idea.

The ones that are large enough to arrange deals, just like NYT, which is what the parent was talking about

> I still don't get why websites are not able to find in-house ad solutions that are not provided by third parties.

Because interacting with the advertising industry, or advertisers directly, is a lot more complicated than just slapping a banner spot on your page/app¹, and sites want to concentrate on with their core business rather than learning another one.

[1] finding people to advertise, negotiating rates, arranging reports of add positioning and response², detecting click-fraud, convincing your ad partners that you have dealt with any click-fraud & other such issues, convincing your ad partners that your agreement with them really did involve them paying you at some point before the heat death of the universe, etc.

[2] so they can marry that up with the logs of incoming attention on their systems

Even if a third-party is involved, they could serve ads based on the content of the page instead of showing me ads for the products I bought yesterday.

This has been done in the industry from very early on and is typically referred to as "Contextual" advertising. I and the company I co-founded are huge proponents of contextual as it generates positive ROAS (return on ad spend). The "problem" is that a contextual impression typically sells for less than an impression that is leveraging audience (user) data, so there is a tremendous incentive from middlemen to collect and peddle data - so much so that the entire industry all but forgot about contextual for almost a decade. I do think however that the promise of accuracy in audience data is very much oversold and not worth the tradeoff in user privacy, particularly in the loosely coupled world of programmatic advertising, which is anything in the open web and not something like walled garden (facebook) ads.

Or at least take responsibility for what they help to publish. Preventing delivery of malware, ensuring that each ad can be traced to someone responsible, ... like newspapers.

It does[0]. Google gives a breakdown of site revenue from contextual versus personalized ads it seems [1]. Maybe someone here with a voluminous adsense property can report which is more, but from what I remember years ago, personalized ads often still dominate on revenue.

0: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9007336?hl=en

1: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1055502?hl=en

The market is full of fraud, and the surveillance exists as a counter to the fraud. Users are surveilled in an effort to prove that they are real users, not bots that are being used to fake impressions or clickthroughs. It's all very messy.

Place yourself in the shoes of an ad buyer: a random website offers to display your ad. How do you know what you're getting?

Only some billing models are vulnerable to fraud though. The old school "your ad here for 2 weeks for this price" is not vulnerable to it since you're no longer charging per click/impression.

The "measurement function" becomes the uptick in sales resulting from the unique link embedded in said ad and ultimately the money that lands in the bank.

Yes, share of voice is a lot simpler to reason about and is still done nowadays. It all comes down to yield maximization. One buyer may buy x% of impressions of y quality, so the publisher/website will try to extract as much value from the remaining impressions by auctioning them. There's certainly a lot of lemons that are created in that process.

Sure it is. Just figure out what IP the advertiser is checking from (if they have time to check at all) and show the ad to only that IP. The slot can then be sold repeatedly.

That's trivially negated by services which constantly monitor the website from thousands of residential IPs all around the world.

Until you negotiate for the next cycle and the ad buyer realizes nobody clicked the link

Lots of people clicked the link, it's just that they were all people with botted machines.

The company could still tell from there being a 0% conversion rate.

Maybe their landing page just sucked.

You don’t. I don’t place an ad on the side of a random bus, instead I place it on the side of a bus that drives a route and schedule I know.

If I buy a newspaper ad I don’t buy unless the paper is well known enough that I can trust their number they claim is their total circulation.

Yes: for the web this means no one buys ads on the bottom 99% of sites.

But the ad networks also serve fraudulent ads and even worse, malware. How is that an improvement?

> I still don't get why websites are not able to find in-house ad solutions that are not provided by third parties.

Because marketing department people come and go so they don't have time/motivation to learn some in-house tool. They know gtag and they are happy with it.

You are asking why subcontracting exists.

A webmaster wants to sell ad space, but doesn't want to go and court each and every marketer buying ad space who will just rebuff individual proposals anyway.

A marketer wants to buy ad space, but doesn't have time to sift through millions if not billions of websites and court their webmasters one by one.

Ad platforms bring together the webmasters and the marketers with a one-stop shop. The webmaster courts Google and gets ads to sell his ad space to. The marketer courts Google and gets ad space to put his ads on.

TL;DR: Efficiency and logistics. Capitalism ho!

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