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Comment by av500 | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my ignorance, but what would prevent ad-serving websites from totally "inlining" the ads inside their own website html/css/js/? They could even render ads as fonts and vectors graphics, how would an ad-blocker tell that apart from the content part of the web page?

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I've known a couple of companies who've worked on server-side ad fetching, stitching ad images together with content images, using only first-party cookies, etc. In both cases it was just too soon - the ad blocking problem wasn't deemed big enough to justify switching over from current ways of doing things.

Ad-blocking blocking (and analytics-blocking blocking) will be a real business someday, but I've never wanted to try it simply because I don't think I could time the market right.

Most people use ad networks and ad networks generally don't provide a way to get the ads on the server side. That would also be more complicated than sticking an iframe/script tag on the page for the publisher.

If you don't want to use a network, you have to sell the ads direct yourself - which isn't easy.

I am aware that it would be more complicated, but not impossible. I guess for the time being the percentage of blocked ads is still small, but once it gets significant websites and ad providers will take the next step in the arms race

Besides what sdcooke said, ad networks also use the HTTP requests to track users. Embedding the ad in the (third-party) page defeats that purpose.

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