Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

It is the same story over and over again. Yes, for a business running a website of any sorts, it is easy money just to include ads from an independant (from you) ad provider. By just signing up and including the necessary scripts into your web site, the money keeps coming without any further effort necessary. This is also the reason, we have so many new web sites popping up - just by attracting traffic you can make money.

But the downside - at least for any legitimate business like newspapers - is, that you are selling out your estate to someone you do not control. And as experience shows, the ad providers mostly don't deserve the trust which they are given. As a consequence, ad blocking more and more becomes an act of self-defense.

What is needed is the return of running ads like printed magazines did - the inclusion of the ads needs to be part of the editing process and curated by the publication. They need to take up full responsibility and liability for the ads they serve. And as a consequence, ads might be actually get looked at again. Personally, I am much more likely to look at a printed ad and usually it is much more relevant than the "targetted" crap we get to see on the web.

This is the only acceptable ad:

    <a href="ad.site"><img src="foo.png"></a>

I will keep blocking until the industry changes to this.

Don't advertisers need to be able to run JavaScript on the page to ensure the page hit was actually seen by a user? Otherwise, I could HTTP GET "foo.png" all day. The advertiser could be paying big dollars, and the website serving the ad could tell the ad company "yeah, we showed foo.png 10,000" times without having a way to verify it.

You can easily see how many people coming from that ad brought your product. Why would you care about the origin statistics?

The Origin header can be spoofed. The point is, if advertisers don't have confidence the number of time an ad is shown is legit, then the site hosting the ad has all the power.

Print ads don’t seem to care about how many times the ad had been seen, they just pay for the ad to be there for X amount of times or for Y issues of that particular magazine.

Why can’t web ads be the same? “Pay X to have your banner here for a week”

I've been thinking about this a lot, actually. Advertising doesn't have to be terrible. We already have basically everyone on youtube sponsored by SquareSpace or nordvpn or something, right? Because the ads on youtube are shit pay and everyone hates them. People don't like the squarespace or nordvpn ads but they're more integrated into the video so they aren't as simply blockable, and at least they're paying the creator directly so they're seen as a more necessary evil.

Why not build advertising profiles, then, not on users? Why not build them on the channels? A few channels I follow already have models similar to this, like for example PBS Eons is sponsored by CuriosityStream which is 100% right up the alley of anyone who likes PBS Eons. So why not figure out a way to, instead of tracking everyone so aggressively everywhere they go, find some way to build advertising profiles that match with the content of the video? I've gotten so sick of seeing ads that are totally irrelevant to what I'm watching or reading that I use an adblocker everywhere I can - this is the only reason I still root my android phone. But surely we can do better? If I'm looking up, say, information about electronic drum sets as I've been doing the past few days, I should be getting ads on those youtube videos or those reddit pages or those reviews about other options I have. Seeing stuff about something I searched last week is both irrelevant AND creepy.

I fully agree. Adds which are integrated into the content, especially into the youtube videos are difficult to impossible to block, but also usually acceptable because the content provider or the youtuber do stake their reputation on them and have full control about the content.

And my experience matches yours, I am much more likely to get actual interesting information and consequential the ad might lead to an actual purchase, if it is not generated by tracking me - usually those ads just repeat what I looked at recentlxy - but by being related to the content I am interested in. Much more likely to be something interesting and especially new to me.

There's another plus side to this, the fact that the add is delivered in the style of the channel/presenter, instead of being a pasteurized boilerplate pre-recorded crap, some of them can be very entertaining.

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