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Comment by zubspace | Hacker News Reader

What I would love to see is putting this whole advertising market into the hands of the webmasters. A system installed on the webserver, where the webmaster offers ad-space which can be bought directly by the advertiser. Ads will be hosted from the same url as the page. I believe, this could be a win-win situation for the website owner and the advertiser.

- More revenue for websites

- Better adds, because webmasters are interested in keeping their site nice and clean.

- To spice this up, there could be a central authority which simply brings together those offers.

The only one who loses are current ad networks.

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Yes, this seems to be the root of most of the problems described by OP and some comment threads here. In old school print ads, the publisher decides what is appropriate advertising for their readers. This needs to be possible for web site publishers, too. With status quo ad networks, AFAICT it's not possible.

It seems that ad networks are a necessary evil to match many small advertisers with many small web sites. (No revolutionary "disintermediation" here; quite the opposite.) The question with distributors is, which end do they feel they work for? Today's ad networks view advertisers as the customer to serve. Instead, although I don't know if it's economically viable, it seems like we need ad networks who view the web site publisher as a client to serve. And who give publishers the tools to accept only ads they deem appropriate in terms of content as well as ad tech.

Except this wouldn't work well when you are an advertiser looking to advertise on hundreds of medium size sites simultaneously. That's one of the reasons middlemen like ad networks exist in the first place, so that you don't have to contact, negotiate and set up advertising with every single site individually.

You could still make the attempt to advertise on hundreds of sites simultaneously, it would just require the authors of those sites to approve your content and deem it suitable for their readers.

This is something that should be in your interest as an advertiser too, because if an author thinks your ad won't do well with her readers, then you are wasting your money by targeting them.

That's excellent, I like it!

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