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VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

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Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#181

Post by spiderfarmer »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #176
spiderfarmer wrote: post #133

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

If you throw in "No Flash, Java, or JavaScript" that sounds like a killer idea for a YC submission.

Could be, but my passion lies elsewhere so if anyone would like to give it a go, be my guest.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#182

Post by dhimes »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #163
ju-st wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about fraud?

As in? Both views and clicks can still be tracked so fraud will have to be dealt with in the same way as it is right now. If you are saying that fraud is harder to detect without building user profiles, that might be so. But it's not impossible. If you are saying that ads can be changed into clickbait I guess you'll have find a way to deal with that. I think an ad network should have an active relationship with both…

Furthermore I don't believe that fraud is being stopped now. I have paid google for a lot of meaningless clicks on their search network (people come to a page for a second or two). Not just a few- but the bulk of the clicks are like that.

And don't get me started on mobile.

That's why I'm staying away from ppc and am advertising with CPM. My spidey-sense tells me it hasn't been as thoroughly gamed yet.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#183

Post by sunstone »

On my desktop the fan literally starts winding up for takeoff when I hit one of these pages. Taken across all the users how much electricity is just being wasted by these things?

Perhaps there should be a running "hall of shame" listing of the most egregious offending pages. Sure it's not their fault directly but these days few organizations want to be associated with the useless wasting of energy.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#184

Post by cantlin »

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important.

We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it.

We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!"

Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.

The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry.

I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.

Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.

[0] https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#185

Post by dhimes »

nailer wrote: post #47
archon810 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is pretty much all networks do this.

Maybe there's a market there? An ad network content providers can trust. Even well known news websites have ios app store redirects that stop content from being viewed.

Maybe what we need isn't an ad network, but a service that makes it easy for sites to self-host ads. Like some sort of gateway- I'm thinking adapter pattern- so that advertisers build their ads to a certain spec, and the web site plugs them in. The ad isn't served by a third party, just spec'd by it. We'd also need a plug-and-play payment pattern.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#186

Post by ebiester »

KB1JWQ wrote: post #137
mpclark wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a publisher to work out who they are dealing with. The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense, the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of networks were infiltrating through that little window. The only re…

As a user, I'm requesting only YOUR content. I don't get a choice past that what your revenue model looks like. Your decision (or not) to host ads from various networks means that from my perspective, I visit your page and suddenly my performance / bandwidth turns to garbage. Ergo the lesson I learn is to not visit your site. How's that a net positive for content creators?

The hard part, for me, is that if I have 20 tabs open, I don't know which ad is killing my bandwidth and performance. In fact, it might be all of them combined.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#187

Post by spiderfarmer »

dhimes wrote: post #182
spiderfarmer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in? Both views and clicks can still be tracked so fraud will have to be dealt with in the same way as it is right now. If you are saying that fraud is harder to detect without building user profiles, that might be so. But it's not impossible. If you are saying that ads can be changed into clickbait I guess you'll have find a way to deal with that. I think an ad network should have an active relationship with both…

Furthermore I don't believe that fraud is being stopped now. I have paid google for a lot of meaningless clicks on their search network (people come to a page for a second or two). Not just a few- but the bulk of the clicks are like that. And don't get me started on mobile. That's why I'm staying away from ppc and am advertising with CPM. My spidey-sense tells me it hasn't been as thoroughly gamed yet.

If you want to be truly disruptive, you could build an ad network that doesn't require you to pay for bounces. An improved version of Google's quality score (read: one that works) would also improve the quality of the network as a whole.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#188

Post by CPLX »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #133

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

How much have you spent in the past year on advertising?

If the answer is none or not much, you may see the problem with this analysis, as it has as much bearing on what the market will provide as my opinion on what I would like to see in woman's grooming products.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#189

Post by kbart »

makomk wrote: post #179
kbart wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?" Simple. Write that in big, bold letters at the top of your site. You know, the same place where that autoplay video ad usually goes.

A site I sometimes frequent has a big, bold banner at the top asking people to disable adblock and claiming it doesn't use audio ads and other annoying ads. It's also the site whose video ads that autoplayed with sound finally prompted me to install an adblocker after that last upgrade. The problem with claims like these is that they're not trustworthy anymore.

If you don't trust a publisher, there's no reason to whitelist it anyway. Dealing with any business entity always involves some amount of trust: a trust that your order will be fulfilled, your card details won't be misused, your news stories are real, milk from a local market is not spoiled etc. A business that abuses this trust doesn't stay long.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#190

Post by whatever_dude »

cantlin wrote: post #184

At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important. We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it. We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A fe…

Thanks for sharing. Regardless of my opinion on the subject it's always great to read impressions coming from someone who worked on it.
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