Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?

Some things to consider for me:

- Don't put ads where content should be, I hate when I'm scrolling and there is an ad where I should be reading (unless it is displayed at the end of an article)

- Put ads in a designated area, and stick to that single area

- Only display relevant ads if your site is about web design I don't want to see ads about belly fat or ebay

- No flash or animated ads, this is so annoying and probably makes me leave sites the most because it is just distracting from both your content and my train of thought

- Don't display too many ads, this is also a major problem and just makes me assume that there is no real content and you just want to make money (news sites seem to do this a lot)

1) Advertise real products or services. Seems like 3/4 of the ads I see on facebook are scams or vapor. Carefully vet your advertisers to make sure they're legit.

2) Make ads relevant. I'm a happily married stay-at-home dad. I'm not interested in dating ads, but ads for better bottles could get my attention. Keyword-driven or site-demographic-driven ads are a start. As dpcan suggested, browsers could allow us to tag ourselves and our interests, which would be even better.

3) Get rid of common annoyances: flashing ads, ads that eat CPU and grind my browser to a crawl, ads on sites I might visit from work or with my kids that aren't safe for work/kids, popups/popunders, ads that block my view of the content I'm looking for, and misleading ads. (Again, if you're a host, vet your ads!)

4) Do not compromise user privacy. Don't track my browsing; base ads off of the site I'm on or information I voluntarily tagged myself with.

Many of the webcomics I read use Project Wonderful, and they seem to have a pretty good model. I regularly see interesting ads, and almost never see offensive ads, scams, or CPU killers.

> Google does well because the ads shown on search bring forth some form of utility.

As far as my personal experience goes, I can't remember a time I encountered a Google ad that was useful for me, unless I was searching for "Amazon.com" and Amazon.com shows up in the sponsored links.

But to answer your question, ads can not suck by simply being perfectly targeted. Even though perfect is impossible, that should be the goal of all advertisers nonetheless. Get as much info about people, and send them only ads you know will be useful. Advertiser wins because they got the word out about their great thing, consumer wins because they got a great thing. The only thing this ideal wouldn't help is a shitty product. Shitty products aren't great, so if they get undeserved attention, they just screw over more people.

A friend and I developed a proof-of-concept system in 2006 to address this opportunity. The central concept was that publishers would receive offers via our advertising marketplace, and then use their own selection algorithm to select ads to display (publishers could choose to use our hosted selection tools, use our open-source selection algorithms, or build their own). This would allow the publisher to use any combination of factors, such as ad format and perceived relevance -- not just eCPM. It is a flexible system that give the publisher the final decision to display or veto an ad.

If anyone wants to read the whitepaper, feel free to send me an email. The truly adventurous can check out the patent application (#11948995).

What about voting/rating ads? I've seen it in a few places, and it seems so simple -- someone has to have information on how it worked out in practice.

I would expect that having an easy, obvious rating meter on each ad would work in two ways. First it could improve targeting by having the user reject ads on a case-by-case basis. Second, ads that get rejected by a wide range of user types can be determined to be bad in general (ugly, offensive, annoying) and thus removed from circulation, automatically.

Does anyone know why this isn't in place more? (Or perhaps I just haven't noticed it?)