Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I still don't get why websites are not able to find in-house ad solutions that are not provided by third parties.

Because interacting with the advertising industry, or advertisers directly, is a lot more complicated than just slapping a banner spot on your page/app¹, and sites want to concentrate on with their core business rather than learning another one.

--

[1] finding people to advertise, negotiating rates, arranging reports of add positioning and response², detecting click-fraud, convincing your ad partners that you have dealt with any click-fraud & other such issues, convincing your ad partners that your agreement with them really did involve them paying you at some point before the heat death of the universe, etc.

[2] so they can marry that up with the logs of incoming attention on their systems

Even if a third-party is involved, they could serve ads based on the content of the page instead of showing me ads for the products I bought yesterday.

Or at least take responsibility for what they help to publish. Preventing delivery of malware, ensuring that each ad can be traced to someone responsible, ... like newspapers.

This has been done in the industry from very early on and is typically referred to as "Contextual" advertising. I and the company I co-founded are huge proponents of contextual as it generates positive ROAS (return on ad spend). The "problem" is that a contextual impression typically sells for less than an impression that is leveraging audience (user) data, so there is a tremendous incentive from middlemen to collect and peddle data - so much so that the entire industry all but forgot about contextual for almost a decade. I do think however that the promise of accuracy in audience data is very much oversold and not worth the tradeoff in user privacy, particularly in the loosely coupled world of programmatic advertising, which is anything in the open web and not something like walled garden (facebook) ads.

It does[0]. Google gives a breakdown of site revenue from contextual versus personalized ads it seems [1]. Maybe someone here with a voluminous adsense property can report which is more, but from what I remember years ago, personalized ads often still dominate on revenue.

0: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9007336?hl=en

1: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1055502?hl=en

Reply on news.ycombinator.com