Reddit uses Adzerk API to improve native ad system | Hacker News Reader

Reddit uses Adzerk API to improve native ad system

adzerk.com

39 pointsjavery19 comments

We've been using Adzerk on 4chan for the past year and it's been a Godsend. We'd previously been using our own in-house rotation that had minimal reporting because every third-party we'd used in the past either a) fell over under load, b) was extremely expensive, or c) had a restrictive ToS.

Well shit, if Adzerk can handle the traffic loads from 4chan (out of curiosity, how many users use adblock?) then it would be perfect for some of the projects I'm working on :)

Adzerk also serves reddit's ads.

Edit: Well this is embarrassing, I was linked here through a user profile and didn't see that this thread was about reddit & adzerk.

Hmmm, I just tried to login to Adzerk using my account that I registered back in March 2013. It doesn't work anymore. I can still enter my username/password, but nothing happens. I can even reset the password.

Perhaps it's because when I signed up, ad serving was claimed to be free for up to 100 million impressions per month. That changed: http://adzerk.com/blog/2014/01/an-update-about-new-free-adze...

"Certainly! If you signed up for an account before January 6th 2014 and were actively serving ads, you can still serve as many impressions as you want for free up to 100 million impressions per month. However, to contact Adzerk support after your 30-day trial ends, you must purchase a support app in the Marketplace."

So I guess they disabled my account because I wasn't actively serving ads? It would have been nice if I had received some kind of notification at least.

Correct - we disabled all the accounts that weren't active when we made the decision to focus on larger customers. We didn't notify accounts because we didn't want people trying to game the system by artificially creating impressions to keep their account open.

Is that how you think of your customer base? Gaming you? Aren't artificial impressions against the terms anyhow?

Someone who doesn't use any services (or log in for a year) can hardly be called a customer.

Where's this entitlement coming from? From the sound of it, your account was serving zero ads at the beginning of 2014. You were clearly not a "customer" of theirs. There's no reason for them to offer you a free 100 million impressions on a service you weren't even using.

Where did I speak of entitlement? I merely commented on Mr. Avery's ways of dealing with unwanted accounts - those who no longer fit into his business plan. Saying that this stealth move was done to avoid users from gaming his system is ridiculous, because gaming the system would have been against the terms to begin with, and thus subject to account cancellation.

There is no reason for him not to notify existing account holders. Heck, he could have done so after the decision was made, i.e. when it would have been too late for anyone to "game" his system. It's not that Adzerk doesn't continue emailing their "Zerkers" for other matters - in November I was notified of their "new homepage with new colors and logo."

We hadn't disabled your account in November - we did that at the beginning of the year for accounts that hadn't been used in a long time.

Seriously, drop it. Your faux outrage is pretty transparent given you didn't even actually use their service.

Not that he can use the service in the first place, or is able to even know what is going on without finding them on a third party message board...

I spoke to Jay I believe and had our account reenabled. It was pretty easy.

When one of these users logs in, do they get a message explaining that?

No - but we have only had a handful of people try to come back to a dead account and we just deal with them on a case by case basis.

Was the previous reddit ad system opensource like their site is ?

Reddit is only partially open-source. Parts of the site code are kept confidential.

Unless things have changed since I worked there, pretty much the only part that's not open source is the anticheating system.

Only the anti-gaming system is not OSS, for obvious reasons.

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