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Comment by timewizard | Hacker News Reader

> which depends on ad revenue

They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.

Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.

> Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea

While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.

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> While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.

Lol, why are you commenting as if somehow allowing it to run negates the other good ideas in some way? Obviously some is better than none, and all is better than some, but each step takes more effort.

lol, because ads pay for the content you're reading. it pays salaries.

what I _don't_ want is to be _tracked_. show me ads all day if you want.

They'd like to show you personalised ads, for more effective manipulation, which implies tracking.

I have bad news for you about how ads work. Also, you didn’t really answer my question, you just dodged it.

I’m not asking what you think makes for a successful ad campaign, I’m asking why you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good

It’s odd that orgs like NYT don’t run their own ad services. I’m sure they have a dedicated department for ad sales for physical copies. They’re large enough that companies would work directly with them. And they would have at least some editorial control on what is displayed on their site.

I've worked for a few companies that had ad placements. I wasn't too deep into that side of things, and it was a long time ago, but as I recall, at reddit there was an in house ad auction platform. If there wasn't any ads sold for the period, we'd either show in house ads (think the old reddit merch store, pics of animals, a pic of one of the reddit staff with a paper tube on his forehead to resemble a narwhal, etc) or ads from a network like AdSense. Once upon a time this actually caused issues because there was malware being served from one of those and networks

The NYT does have a direct-sold ads business and first-party data platform for targeting them: https://open.nytimes.com/to-serve-better-ads-we-built-our-ow...

Targeted ads based on extensive data harvesting are just soo much more juicy though.

That used to be how print newspapers worked.

Hosting the ads on the same server as the content is done in some cases, but doesn’t result in any immunity. If the ads are sufficiently annoying, it only leads to a merry little game with the adblocker annoyance list community, where they figure out new regexen to block the content, deploying daily. Bypass the blocks too effectively, and the adblocker will accidentally start blocking website content. Users will assume the website itself is broken, and visit less.

Self-hosting ads is not really a winning game unless your ads are non-animated, non-modal static text and images.

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