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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#71

Post by brad0 »

HuginnMuninn wrote: post #56

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen? I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable? Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser. I get the feeling that content-creators and…

I quite like this idea. I run a basic http server with a nodejs backend. It gets ~3000 hits a month. It costs around $6 on AWS. It costs around 0.2c per request.

It would be simple to build a system that charges per use - most SaaS companies do this.

The problem is that someone is willing to pay for that content and repost it on the "free web". 99% of people will read the free version (see freemium mobile games).

While content creators agree that they would prefer to charge directly for their content, we live in the attention economy. This means if you don't make yourself hyper accessible then people will go to other places to get their dopamine hit.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#72

Post by p49k »

allanbreyes wrote: post #16
doctorless wrote: post #7

I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it's pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especia…

I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?

Advertisers/ad networks need to serve ads from their own domains so that they can identify the visitor via 3rd-party cookies and serve the most appropriate ad.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#73

Post by tedunangst »

joombaga wrote: post #70
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: not all domain names have an associated website. Mine neither.

Yeah, but they usually have a DNS record. Which, encona.com does. text and MX, just no A or CNAME.

An MX record perhaps.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#74

Post by arich »

exikyut wrote: post #64

IMO the way to solve this is a single-click "pay this tiny amount to keep reading" UI. Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable. But it won't happen until Chrome is overturned by a new browser because Google will never let such a model succeed :( It's possible Firefox may successfully do the "phoenix re-viral" thing, in spite of the fact that it would be a literal miracl…

I've never liked those things that popped up but, as I was reading I thought I'd definitely go for it if I had something like a digital wallet in the browser that I could preload with a balance and simply use to pay for websites like that with one click.

Doing a quick google search hasn't shown anything like that. Does anyone know if a browser extension or something like this already exists?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#75

Post by lern_too_spel »

HuginnMuninn wrote: post #56

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen? I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable? Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser. I get the feeling that content-creators and…

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Alternatively, you could set up a bidder that bids for inventory that has paying customers' cookies and doesn't show an ad when it wins an auction.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#76

Post by jdangu »

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN.

At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily.

They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield, they resend ad requests in a loop to multiple parties every few seconds until an ad clears, leading to this massive network load.

We're on a mission to drive them out of business (and we're hiring ;) )

[1] https://www.confiant.com (edit forgot link)

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#77

Post by Qub3d »

If anyone is curious (like I was) what exactly is being shown here, the author initially wrote a post in 2016 describing VPAID ad interfaces[0].

It appears this whole thing got started when the Author (who founded AndroidPolice) got a bug request about an AP site ad[1].

[0]: https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/VgrLdYcoifr

[1]: https://github.com/archon810/androidpolice-public/issues/67

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#78

Post by tomjakubowski »

EGreg wrote: post #62
doctorless wrote: post #7

I'm actually rather surprised that companies like Google aren't offering solutions to integrate ads into the delivery of the page content itself rather than JavaScript at this point, as it's pretty easy to block the specific domains serving ads. It seems relatively straightforward; the ads would be pre-rendered on the server providing the response and could send the same info a script would for the most part, especia…

Kind of like youtube content creators now put ads in the actual video?

To be clear, it's against YouTube's rules to embed advertiser-supplied content (like a video, image, audio clip, etc.) directly in a YouTube video. YouTubers are free to take money for product placements and endorsements, though, as long as Google is notified.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235?hl=en

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#79

Post by mangoceylon »

kakarot wrote: post #43
rahimnathwani wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the ads were static (e.g. advertiser A bought a specific place on one of publisher B's pages, for a month), and advertiser A didn't want independent verification that the ads were seen, then your proposal could be simply implemented. "What am I missing?" Many ads are served after real-time auction: whilst your browser is loading and rendering the page, an auction is going between advertisers for the ad spot(s) on…

Would you mind expanding a bit on this real-time auction thing, like how common it is and what the process looks like, or could you point me in the direction of the sources you used to make that claim? Thanks!

If you poke around AppNexus, you will find what you are looking for. The process is basically: a visitor comes to the site, each connected ad network/buyer has 100ms to provide a bid, the top bidder wins.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#80

Post by jdangu »

tomlor wrote: post #15

I've seen some other pretty abhorrent behavior as well. The specific instance that comes to mind is an ad that would load all the resources and content of its click-through landing page into a hidden part of its own iframe. Then in the off chance you click the ad, your browser cache is already warmed and the resulting landing page loads fast. All of that for the 0.1% of us that click ads. It boggles the mind.

That's not the reason, it's ad fraud. They are most likely paid on CPC (cost per click) and forcing clicks in a hidden iframe. Or they are "stuffing cookies" for an affiliation link, betting that you might buy on that store later on - and getting a commission out of it.
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