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Comment by newtem0 | Hacker News Reader

I still dont understand why simple endorsments dont work for some sites. Just put a text banner somewhere prominent that says "thanks bobs burgers for being our sponsor" there is no way ad blockers could pick that text out of all the other text and block it. And there is no reason anyone would want to block it anyway.

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How much should you pay for that endorsement? Normally, you'd pay based on how many people see the ad. That, then incentives lying about how many people saw the ad, or creating fake views with bots. To deal with that, you add in Javascript that checks if the ad is genuinely visible and, try to validate that they aren't a bot, and whatever other fakery they try.

Adding a layer on top of that, people generally have a target audience, so if you want them as a customer, you might have to inject some more Javascript to determine if the user is part of the target audience.

And pretty soon the site is full of tracking beacons and blobs of JS.

Do we really have to track everyone? What ever happened to a flat fee per month to have a static banner in place on a relevant website?

Aside from tracking, I assume they like the JavaScript because they get more metrics, a/b testing, etc. So they can tweak the ad to perform better.

Daringfireball.com.

John Gruber's ad model for over a decade is to post one RSS sponsorship on Monday and a thank you on Friday. He charged $8000 a week it.

https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Another interesting and simple ad model that I saw was on a bitcoin gambling site. The ads were a small image banner at the top of the site. Each advertiser would choose a daily rate to pay. Then each time the page was loaded an ad was selected randomly weighted by daily rate (eg. Alice pay $1/day and Bob pays $2/day, Bob's ads show up twice as often). I like how simple it was while still allowing advertisers to bid against each other. The total ad revenue of the site would scale directly with website traffic. There are no trackers, no third party services, and no JS. Just simple get what you pay for. Want more? pay more.

Yeah, but then you've got cases like this: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...

I've been using adblockers for about ten years now, but blocking that just seems over the top and I understand Troy's frustration. I want a blocker to prevent trackers from being loaded and for removing annoying crap from webpages. That includes most ads, newsletter popups, interstitials, maybe social widgets and cookie notices, but certainly not "Sponsored by [Company Name]: [A sentence about the company]".

Why is that thing loaded by javascript, and why is it on a different domain from the site (with www vs. without it).

It took way too many steps for me to get to see the sponsor message.

Troy's sponsor message isn't loaded by JavaScript. Someone blacklisted the div id on the list several ad blockers are using.

The div is static, the sponsor name is dynamic.

You can't charge as much for that kind of ad, because it has poorer targeting, can't be updated as easily to facilitate shorter marketing campaigns, can't support A/B testing, and probably a dozen other major things advertisers care about.

I do occasionally see that kind of sponsorship, but only on websites that take very little time/money to maintain.

Some do. It has a host of disadvantages.

1) not trackable by client for pvs 2) not easily rotated, or if so requires home grown ad server or integration with web app

Those ads are very expensive to place on the page and have lower inventory. Aka less efficient than popular ads

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