Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

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> Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval.

Partially agree. Publishers should definitely be able to blacklist advertisers. However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions. Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous.

I would like to see approval required for anything executable: JavaScript, Flash, etc. Waking up to find that your website has become an attack vector through malicious banner ads is not okay.

> Ban user tracking and targeting.

Mostly disagree.

I click on a meme site. There's not a lot of relevant ads for that. I could get served ads for lolcats-themed merchandise that I don't want, or low-value broad-targeted ads that probably still aren't relevant to me. Nobody wins.

Or, based on my search history, I could get ads for computer parts that I'm actually interested in. I get ads that are relevant, the publisher gets more revenue, and the advertiser has a real chance at a sale. Everyone wins.

> It's a red queen's race and no one benefits.

That couldn't be less true.

Now, systems that try to track individual people (rather than blocks with similar demographic/behavioral traits) are a serious problem. We do need stricter controls to prevent this.

> Pay for ad time slots, not user impressions.

Here we go. You want to throw away the very thing that democratized digital advertising. You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.

Hard disagree.

> Use anti-trust to prevent link aggregators from being advertisers.

I'm not sure how anti-trust ties into this. Are you alleging that, say, Fark has a monopoly status, and is abusing it to gain an unfair advantage in an adjacent market?

Now, I think you're on to a very real problem here--advertising dollars are being diverted away from the organizations that produce content--but severing the only real revenue source for most aggregators seems like an inappropriate response.

"However, networks like Google get thousands of ads that run for only a handful of impressions."

Yes, that is the promise of these networks - that there are exactly 8 people searching for this search string every day and I could show just those people this very targeted ad.

I wish this were the case, but unless something has changed in the last few years, it is not.

You see, google scores your ad on a "quality" metric and if your ad only rates a handful of clicks it will be disabled and can only be reenabled by paying a very onerous (20x, even 50x) premium. Even if the search terms are esoteric and not targeted by anyone other advertisers, google would rather show nothing than show your ad.

So I am afraid this dream of a niche product showing a highly targeted ad to a handful of searchers each day is actively thwarted by google.

Frankly it's no longer an issue for us - the venn diagram of "people smart enough to use rsync.net" and "people not using an adblocker" contains zero people.

> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.

No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot.

You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.

Who is going to go around approving 100 minor ads for each timeslot, with no targeting? This sounds like a recipe for making no money. I think the GP is just nostalgic for TV ads.

Magazines and newspapers and television and radio and billboards and (usually) podcasts are all existence proof that someone will go around approving 100 minor ads.

I tend to agree (but that doesn't mean that the 5 figure argument is a good one).

Might be missing something, how is "every 100th impression" during a timeslot that on average contains 100 impressions different from just selling a single impression?

Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.

The same way that selling a timeslot that happens to be sized so that on average there will be one impression is not selling one impression. You aren't pretending to be able to accurately decide whether any given page load is an impression. You aren't even guaranteeing that there will be a page load, let alone an impression.

It seems like a way of directly eliminating fraud, by preventing people from having an avenue to lie about impressions, and a way of discencentivizing tracking, since impressions stop being the billing metric and therefore stops "needing" to be accurate. Hopefully this (as well as the other things suggested by OP to discentivize tracking) would result in less tracking and less hoarding of dangerous user data.

Agreed... Timeslots seem like slapping a technical restriction from a prior medium on the web for no particular reason. I'm not even sure what problem it's actually meant to solve?

> Asking publishers to manually approve every single ad that might run is onerous.

Maybe they should find a better business model, then.

I think they already have, at least from their perspective

Not a single publisher believes the internet is a “better” business model than the old world. Google does. Facebook does.

Aren't those 2 of the biggest publishers?

Depends on how you define it. A “publisher” should pay its content producers, so YouTube would be. Nothing else Google or FB do though.

Memes are just comic books and comic books have had ads forever. There’s no reason you couldn’t put ads against a meme site.

> You want a system where either you pay five figures to reserve a time block, or you don't get to play.

This is not what I observed from Project Wonderful when they were still around. Ok I guess it wasn’t precisely timeslots, so much as “amount of time” (though one could choose to only bid during the time you want), but the prices I saw were fairly often low enough that people would briefly get the slot just for a gag.

Pretty sure there were even bidding wars between groups who were both doing jokes?

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