Ask HN: Why don't publishers serve ads from their domains to thwart ad-blockers?

Here's how a typical banner/adspace currently works:

1. The ad/banner space downloads a javascript file

2. Javascript runs, collects browser+cookie+other identifying information and sends it on up to an ad exchange

3. The ad-exchange systems cross-reference the information it receives with other information it already has (think huge low latency k/v store) in order to try to identify you further, perform cross-device identification, save more information

4. The ad-exchange system then rolls all this information together and fans out this package saying "here is a male aged 25-35 who likes ponies and bick shaving cream" to dozens or hundreds of partnered ad providers

5. Each ad provider looks at their content, finds a close match, and then bids on how much they would pay in order to serve content to this person

6. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder (no idea why it's the second highest)

7. Ad-exchange then sends this second highest bidder's ad URL back to the waiting javascript running in the users browser, and ad-exchange marks the winning bid so it knows who won/who has to pay at the end of the month.

8. From 1 to here usually has an SLA of occurring in less than 170ms

9. User's browser then loads up the response URL and the ad displays

Asking website operators to host their own thing is feasible, but perhaps not worthwhile. The big money maker in adspace is targeted advertising, and small sites will never have the infrastructure to be able to really identify anybody but perhaps their core users. Others have mentioned reverse proxies to make content appear as if it came from the target site, and that may exist, but the reality is whatever these guys do is currently being defeated pretty handily by community driven ad blocking. Perhaps we will eventually see what you're talking about though

Welcome to the 90s, when advertising on the web was not profitable. ;)

I totally agree with what is wrong with advertising on the web, which is basically everything, but there is also value to impressions.

Let's say a new movie is coming out. I don't care if you go to the movie website, I just want to get the actors' faces in front of you with a movie name.

Same goes for a political candidate. I don't need you to go to Bernie Sanders' website, I just need you to know that he's running and a couple of things that he stands for.

The problem is that advertising and tracking are inherently connected today. Want to target ads to people who are likely to respond to them? You need profiles on all those users. Want privacy? You need to starve the collection of your data to build profiles.

IMO this is precisely why Google still gives me better results than DuckDuckGo - not _only_ do they sometimes know who I am and things about me, but their data set is based on knowing so much about all of us.

I also find that supremely unsettling.

Having worked on ad-driven properties, I'll say it's pretty common to track things at both ends. The advertiser always wants the impressions / click-throughs / whatever to be as low as possible, and the operators of the site want it to be higher. Much negotiation ensues.

Also, most folks don't have direct ad sales, though this is the holy grail in ad-driven properties, most sites use doubleclick and a suite of others, and often an intermediary inventory management service which picks the ads which pay the most for a given hour or day and maybe switch out providers based on their speed (doubleclick also gets really slow at busy times and will cause your site not to load :/)

Sites could easily refuse to serve content to people who run adblockers or who turn off Javascript.

Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.

I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.

It depends on the publication. If you're ESPN you have a pretty good idea (which, by the way, makes the publication as a whole more valuable)

If you're Yahoo, however, it's pretty much a toss up.

As an engineer in a Ads company, I totally agree. It's not just grab ad content from your customer, write some api integration with various publisher and send them the ad. The complexity involved in serving an ad properly and efficiently is way beyond the understanding of outsiders. Rotation, different kind of measurable metrics (we have at least 3x metrics than you can see from google analytics), ad serving efficiency (believe or not, we are able to serve ads faster than some publishers serve their own content), tons of targeting configurations and more. Tracking makes all those things possible.