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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

But if you're using AdBlock, won't you likely be blocking my malware-free, privacy-protecting ads too? You wouldn't even know they exist...

I agree with your larger point though. For all the (legitimate) hand-wringing about ad networks tracking people and building profiles... they still suck at targeting ads. A lot. I think we're still in the Stone Age of ad matching algorithms.

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It depends on how ads are blocked by the user, and it also depends on how you frame it. For example: I don't block advertising on Something Awful, because the ads there are both unobtrusive and occasionally quite relevant or interesting to me, even in terms of pointing me at things I didn't realize I had an interest in. I'll also usually unblock sites that detect that I'm running an adblocker and ask me politely to stop.

I will, however, make a point of blocking ads on any site that decides to drop full-screen overlays, modal dialogs, javascript popovers, or any of that other crap that ad agencies seem to love these days. If your ad is interfering with my browsing experience, I'm not going to waste my time even considering interacting with it.

I would think the vast majority of AdBlock users have it set to try to block all ads by default, though I admit I have no data to prove that.

Ads done 'the best way' are unlikely to fall foul of ad blockers, no script, etc. Deliver your ads from the same domain, as static content, and you're likely to be fine. Bonus points for not slowing down the browsing experience, and altering the layout at random intervals for about a minute after page load (see theguardian.com)

Delivering ads from the same domain is impossible for small publishers. If you insist on using your own adserve, that means your numbers will decide the billing, whic leaves the possibility for fraud, which is unacceptable to the advertiser. Then you have the problem eith actually finding advertisers. A smal site can't dedicate resources for ad selling and relies heavily on networks for monetization.

> your numbers will decide the billing

Only if the model is payment-per-view as opposed to payment-per-click, or commission on referral sales

> then you have the problem [w]ith actually finding advertisers

Isn't there the same problem with the third-party model, unless you go for a completely automated solution like AdWords? Isn't there an opportunity for a middleman to match up publishers and advertisers? Couldn't an automated system still work on a same-domain basis via advertiser-provided APIs?

Clicks are nice and a lot of people focus on them, but it's not a viable option for a lot of publishers/industries. Brand advertisers are about sending messages rather than driving traffic to pages and converting people there. Around 70% of display advertising is not direct response orientated.

The typical adnetworks give you ad tags which you put on your site and the ads are served from their ad servers. Then there are a few companies [1][2][3] that are marketplaces faciiliating transactions between publishers and advertisers, but they still use their own platform to serve the ads. And then larger buyers give them adtags, served by their own servers. Nobody in their right mind will just wire you money for ad inventory and just take your word for the traffic unless you are a very large name and have a proprietery self-serve platform (AOL/yahoo style). And even on these platfroms a lot of advertisers still use their own adtags (a recent java malware attack through yahoo's network comes to mind).

[1] buyads.com [2] buysellads.com [3] blogads.com

PS: sry for typos and formatting, on the phone atm.

Doing direct deal in house advertising is not feasible for most publishers

You sure about that? EasyList, the most common block list, clearly intends to block ALL ads, even self hosted ones. it blocks by css class name, directory name, image dimension, etc. It's updated frequently as users report unblocked ads.

(Not to mention how incredibly hard it would be to sell ads set up like that.)

Doesn't that flag a lot of false positives (in fact, I have personal experience of an ad blocker that did exactly that by blocking images with numbers in the filename)? Conversely, there's no way that can block ALL ads, unless it literally blocks all ... content.

Yes, certainly. But it's still the most popular filter subscription. I think this suggests that most people using AdBlock want to block all ads, not just network ads.

Adblock Plus offers the option to display ads that follow a certain set of rules.

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