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Comment by Arnt | Hacker News Reader

Most companies don't serve their own ads. They sell an iframe reference in a particular kind of page to someone else who runs their own adserver software, so there's a detectable footprint for organisational reasons.

Quite often there's more than one level of resale; I've seen five and a friend who works in the business told me he's seen even more.

(Digression: I have also heard that Ghostery (.com) makes most of its money by telling companies what ads are on their web pages.)

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I understand the iframe/network issue, which is why suggested a downloadable script that publishers could host that would grab the ad server-side, reference it as a a locally-hosted image or include the text of a text ad in the native content of the page, and send all links to a local redirect script. It wouldn't be that much more difficult for a publisher to roll such a thing out than it is for them to add the iframes or javascript they use today.

That approach would be slower (oddly enough the ad people seem to care about performance) and worse, the ad server loses its cookies. When it's on its own domain it can use cookies and track people across web sites.

The alternative is that their ads don't get shown, so would you prefer worse or nothing at all?

By not using that possible proxy, they give adblockers something to work with, but they also increase the price of the ads they can sell for the rest of the audience.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the recent squealing is really a sanitised form of "the loss from the adblockers has grown bigger than the gains from the increased ad prices, but noone understands our webapp tomcat CRM monster well enough to adapt."

That's downandout's point. Don't use that method...use a proxy so it appears that the content (ads) come from the company's website.

Yes this is a major problem. Early in the life of a lot of websites you'll see user complaining about the use of auto-playing audio ads, or stupidly laggy flash video ads.

When the administrator has no clue whats being shown on their webpage. That in and of itself is a huge issue that ad companies are non-to-eager to address.

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