Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 404 posts

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

#321

Post by archon810 »

_ao789 wrote: post #207
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…

This is literally what HaloAds (HaloAds.com) aims to fix. We have been irritated with the state of online advertising for long enough now. We are looking for people to try it out once it launches. Show your interest at https://HaloAds.com

Signed up to be notified, but new companies in my experience have a lot of issues with fill and CPM. How are you planning to compete?

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

#322

Post by afandian »

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…

And in doing so made something that doesn't work with the most recent browser on my phone. And breaks in a very annoying way.

https://twitter.com/joewass/status/720661385504538625

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

#323

Post by scottmmjackson »

manigandham wrote: post #285
dave_sullivan wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is a weird business. There's different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads). Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now), television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad industry because that's where all your customers are and it's very trackable. The value to the advertiser is either direct-action ("click here and buuuuuy!")…

> So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find someone who will tell them it is. I'll be the first to say there's a lot of mismanagement, incompetence, politics, etc that leads to this but it's also one of the most data driven ind…

I'll go even further: it's a big industry. Companies of all size and sophistication buy advertising in huge amounts.

You have some players who have honed their advertising strategy for years to try to get the biggest bang for their buck- and they're willing to pay to have professionals work out how to hone it further.

You also have unheard-of locals who have pinstriped sales reps telling them about how much money they're going to make if they buy this billboard or phone book page, and agencies paying big bucks to get the pinstripiest, salesiest representatives to the right suckers as efficiently as possible.

Then there's everything in-between for all the people who are in way over their heads but want to at least imitate the ones who are doing it right.

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

#324

Post by lpgauth »

phamilton wrote: post #266
lpgauth wrote: post #168

This as nothing to do with VPAID[1], it's the player that decides how many ads to play. VPAID is just an IAB standard for video ads... [1] http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interf...

That's mostly true. The player decides how long to allow the ads to play. It's very possible to put multiple ads in a single VPAID unit.

Sure, but the player will decide how many ads to play.

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

#325

Post by archon810 »

lpgauth wrote: post #168

This as nothing to do with VPAID[1], it's the player that decides how many ads to play. VPAID is just an IAB standard for video ads... [1] http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interf...

Every single time I've seen a VPAID ad, it's done what you're seeing in the linked post. It enables advertisers to do nasty and obnoxious things, easily abuse the system without punishment, and so it gets the beating end of my stick.

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

#326

Post by manigandham »

idlewords wrote: post #316
manigandham wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adblockers are just software and there are already dozens of ways to work around this. It's not the end of the world but a new paradigm that requires more work than before. Part of the benefit is that it's a reset in the industry that should get rid of some of the bad vendors and help improve the experience by showing advertisers that consumers do care about UX and choice. Advertising will always be around though. No…

How is digital advertising 'better than ever' when everyone seems to agree that the situation is untenable? I admire your optimism that putting consumers and advertisers in a directly adversarial relationship (by forcing them into an arms race around blocking) will somehow make everything great, but I have a hard time sharing it.

Hey Maciej - maybe this will go better than our twitter exchange a few months back.

This is a much longer discussion than fit for HN but digital advertising is doing better in pretty much every metric: There's more time spent with ads, deeper engagements, more conversions/ROI and better formats than ever before. Take a look at any of the big apps and platforms that have billions of interactions that happen every day for the data to back this up. Adblocking, even at the scale it is today, is still a small percentage of the entire market.

I'm not sure who you're referring to with "everyone" but the situation is definitely not untenable. It's just outdated. Advertising is always a relationship between the advertiser, publisher and consumer but the consumer was never really considered in the past because they had no power or way to provide feedback. Adblocking is changing that dynamic and giving power to the people while letting advertisers know that they need to actually consider the user experience.

Since the advertising model isn't going to go away, the natural evolution is that the implementation and approach will change to create better experiences that fit with the way people consume media along with the expectations around privacy, relevance and value. The market will also re-calibrate and rise up from the artificially low rates of today.

This is a massive industry so it won't be quick and there will be lots of pain in the short term. No way around that, but progress is happening and things will absolutely get better. It might be a hated industry (and for good reason) but there are plenty of good people out there working hard and doing the right thing.

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

#327

Post by archon810 »

chrismbarr wrote: post #152
archon810 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all. It only disables the cache if you tell it to. Like so: http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png . As you can see, that checkbox is not on in the demoed GIF. The ad code is actively requesting new ads and pinging its trackers countless times.

ok, sure, it's configurable. But that box is checked by default.

1. Not for any installs of Chrome I've ever had.

2. That's entirely irrelevant in this matter because it was not turned on.

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

#328

Post by spiderfarmer »

bowersbros wrote: post #295
spiderfarmer wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just download them and serve them from your own domain. If you enable HTTP/2 there is little to no advantage of using a third party for hosting fonts.

Wont they be cached from other peoples websites saving the download?

No. Well, maybe, if you're using one of the most popular fonts, but each combination of weights is a seperate CSS file, that's probably a unique combination and only cached for 24 hours. A reason not to use Google fonts is that it's just another tracking tool in their arsenal. For each request, cookies are sent to Google's servers, so they have enough reason to avoid cache hits.

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

#329

Post by tengkahwee »

Unfortunately ad technology and creative companies are not using the VPAID standard properly. Essentially VPAID is simply a JS file. One really bad VPAID I seen is generated through Adobe Animate CC and meshed with a bunch of custom code with jQuery in it. The image assets are all oversized because Samsung Galaxy S6 edge supports 2560 x 1440 and it wasn't resized to fit desktop proportions. The VPAID standard doesn't constrain the designer in terms of payload and how many connections to send.

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

#330

Post by JoshTriplett »

manigandham wrote: post #326
idlewords wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is digital advertising 'better than ever' when everyone seems to agree that the situation is untenable? I admire your optimism that putting consumers and advertisers in a directly adversarial relationship (by forcing them into an arms race around blocking) will somehow make everything great, but I have a hard time sharing it.

Hey Maciej - maybe this will go better than our twitter exchange a few months back. This is a much longer discussion than fit for HN but digital advertising is doing better in pretty much every metric: There's more time spent with ads, deeper engagements, more conversions/ROI and better formats than ever before. Take a look at any of the big apps and platforms that have billions of interactions that happen every day…

> Since the advertising model isn't going to go away

There are plenty of people who would like it to, and personally I hope they win. With sufficiently widespread and robust use of adblocking technology, perhaps advertising will become sufficiently unworkable to go away entirely.

Post reply on HN