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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

#81

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.

If I understand correctly, I don't think an A record is necessary if you're just using the domain for email.

I only use mine for email. I have an A record but that just results in a 'No page found' page hosted by my DNS provider. Without the A record my email would still work but browsing to k45j.com would give a 'This site can’t be reached' the same way encona.com

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#82
post #55
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not with the techniques they're using now, but if humans can tell it's an ad, then an ad blocker with say an image recognition model can too.

Native content can be really difficult for humans to distinguish.

Surely there will be an eventual crackdown of sponsored content that isn't marked as such.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#83
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…

"Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable."

It would require you to add your credit card to every site that wants it at least once. It wouldn't be very convenient and people shouldn't be giving out CC info on the internet that freely.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#84
post #57

I would love to be able to block JS files individually based on energy usage.

That would be fine until jquery-1.9.1-min.js: 3,389 hours of battery usage would refuse to budge from the absolute top of the "probably the best to block" list. The heuristics would be tricky to implement here...

That it’s only a heuristic would be rather the point; users would be able to select urls they wished to disable.

In fact you could probably crowd source training data for a deep learning model so that it could eventually be automated.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#85
post #76

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,…

How is that not fraud?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#86
post #76

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,…

How is that not fraud?

it's fraud.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#87

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…

Doesn't Accelerated Mobile Pages offer something like that? That puts all your content on the Google domain, including the ads (or some version of them, I think?).

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#89
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…

"Now that Amazon's one-click checkout patent has expired this is actually legally viable." It would require you to add your credit card to every site that wants it at least once. It wouldn't be very convenient and people shouldn't be giving out CC info on the internet that freely.

https://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#90
post #76

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,…

How is that not fraud?

It absolutely is fraud. I worked on one of those big video exchanges and we'd sometimes see ads run through our own system multiple times. We couldn't spot it until after the ad ran because of the way the ad actually plays. It ends up a bunch of black box Russian dolls, where the spec says you call methods on the ad unit you are playing, which will just wrap another ad unit, which in turn wraps another ad unit.

We could piece together what happened sometimes after the fact, but not reliably.

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