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Comment by sidewndr46 | Hacker News Reader

I always find this development curious. About a decade ago I worked in this space. When someone brought up ad blockers I just said "put the analytics on our main domain. No one is going to block the entire website". The answer I got was "no one would ever do that because of the implications of serving advertising from your main domain". Yet, here we are.

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They use a third party domain just because that way they can track the user actions with cookies, for example Google can track your navigation across multiple websites, and thus propose to you more relevant ads. Also using a different domain was simpler and cheaper, since you don't have to host the AD content and metadata, just include the JS from the AD provider somewhere in your HTML.

Now that thanks to EU laws and browser imposing restrictions about third-party cookies it's more difficult, the whole "serve ads from other domain" may not be that relevant anyway.

If you use a random wildcard subdomain... just serve them from the main website, what is the difference? On the other side with a proxy just route the AD requests to another server if it needs to be, of course you have to find a way to distinguish which requests are for AD and which are not, something you can do with some sort of signature in the filename, so that only the server can know which requests shall be handled locally and which one forwarded to the AD provider server.

News payers used to all serve their own ads including in house sales and design. Frankly with how key advertising is I don't understand why anyone would out source it.

This. Everyone and their grandma decided it's cool for Google and others to decide what should display on your website next to your content because of "magic online advertising".

How much of the efficiency of online advertising comes from the actual "art" of tracking users and their preferences to display "personalized" ads vs the "efficiencies" from firing/outsourcing your marketing, ad sales and creative workforce.

Advertisers trust other advertisers not to lie but not the content providers. well except Google they trust Google. So you have to use these hella shady and networks that are fly by night and security and privacy nightmares across many domains. Instead of many walled gardens of ads like you're saying.

cost and effectiveness.

selling ad space was always a lot of work. algorithms do it cheaper and in general better.

next step is just to run a GoogleAds lib/proxy...

Until the algorith associates you with an ad for something negative to your audience. Scams for example are common for algorithms to allow while a human can validate some legitimentch

The opportunity cost of lost sales due to unwanted associations is a drop in the bucked compared to the cost of having humans in the loop. And when the most of the market moves to a low-cost regime eventually almost everyone has to because being a holdout now means you can't even find enough other counterparties (to sell your ad space to, or to buy ad space from).

Particularly with the reams of evidence that fraud is rampant, both in advertising content and in claimed click/view rates.

Well, it's just a question of priorities. What do you care about more, security on your site, or getting your ads past ad-blockers?

I'm not surprised there are people who prioritize the latter, especially for small sites where they may not have someone who fully understands the risks.

What are the implications?

If third party ad servers get access to your main domain's cookies, they can impersonate your signed-in users and steal their data.

...Unless you're savvy. Thank goodness for the availability of https://publicsuffix.org/ (as long as you only use your main domain and don't need to share cookies with your own subdomains), and the includeSubDomains directive to HSTS! But - if you already set this up, you probably are savvy enough to avoid the problems created (or your provider is)

HSTS won't prevent this at all; the advertiser merely needs to also set up TLS by getting a certificate for that subdomain, which they can already do precisely because it goes to their web server -- not yours. This also lets them steal cookies marked secure (sent over HTTPS only).

Edit: A combination of DNS CAA with an account identifier restriction in the record would prevent this. Then the advertiser would complain, and any ads served would have to be over plaintext, which would cause browser warnings about mixed content and allow MITM injection of (more) malicious content.

Presumably that adblockers (or rather their users) would object to blocking domains that folks might actually want to load content from. I can’t imagine “domain” is the only signal one could use to identify ads, though. To truly befuddle them you’d make advertisements truly indistinguishable from content. This is not trivial.

Not entirely true. If you lower the quality of your content enough the advertisements are in fact indistinguishable. I often enjoy reading the "chumbox" at the bottom of the news article more than the reporting itself

I think what we're asking is what are the implications for the advertisement company.

And yeah, I can trivially block stuff in uBO by using CSS rules for example, so that's still on the table.

> I think what we're asking is what are the implications for the advertisement company.

Higher impressions? Higher integration cost? I guess I'm not sure what the confusion might be. Advertisers obviously want to ram their bullshit down as many eyesockets as they can find.

It more or less boiled down to "we would be labeled an advertiser and not a destination for information on the internet". Like being an advertiser stopped people from using Google search or something

Or newspapers, both before and after it. They've always been vast advertising platforms, but don't have anywhere near the same stigma that online advertisers have acquired (for extremely good reasons imo - they're as invasive as possible, while printed media has rather tight limits)

They could have become the dominant advertisers online too, and then no doubt they'd be just as nasty. But they lost that war multiple times, first to doubleclick-likes and then to social media.

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