Insane state of today's advertising part 3 • Hacker News Board

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#131

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:16 AM UTC

arich wrote: post #74

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?

This has existed in multiple forms for years. Small micropayments instead of ad views. I believe Google has this feature right now if you opt-in.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#132

Post by baybal2 » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:22 AM UTC

goodnews3879 wrote: post #126

kakarot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's called Real Time Bidding. It gets very complicated, and performance is usually priority #1.

>performance is usually priority #1.

Not usually. Stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids is something usual

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#133

Post by mrep » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:26 AM UTC

jasonkostempski wrote: post #83

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…

"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.

An aggregate service would probably have to service those transactions as credit card usually have $0.30 fee's per transaction so you'd probably need to aggregate all fees to mitigate the minimum charges.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#134

Post by baybal2 » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:28 AM UTC

jdangu wrote: 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,…

>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.

They are stalling for time in every allowed way to get more bids.

A standard tactic for company like theirs is to send duplicate lots for a single impression, and reload the ad few times per second once they get overriding bids even if one of lots was already sold.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#135

Post by rahimnathwani » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:31 AM UTC

kirubakaran wrote: post #129

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pro pro tip, it did at one point ;-) https://web.archive.org/web/20150925213001/encona.com/

Haha, yes it did. But it had little traffic and what little useful information it contained is mostly out of date.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#136

Post by bzbarsky » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:33 AM UTC

jasonkostempski wrote: post #88

Standards should never have allowed third-party scripts to load without insuppressible user prompts. This cluster-fuck could have been avoided.

Third-party script loading is as old as the tag and predates any applicable standards. That is, browsers added before standards did, and allowed cross-site loading of scripts, just like cross-site loading of everything was allowed at that point.

Simpler days, 25 years ago...

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#137

Post by clarry » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:34 AM UTC

teolandon wrote: post #120

ghughes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what the adtech industry is starting to do. They've even got WordPress and Cloudflare plugins that can dynamically reinsert blocked ads via their proxy.

As long as I am able to block any element I want using my browser (and god help us if we reach a state where we can't), I won't have to look at any ad for more than 2 seconds. Any website that has too many ads to disable manually, or is in some way embedded with critical parts of the website is simply not worth my time.

> As long as I am able to block any element I want using my browser (and god help us if we reach a state where we can't)

Render content & ads on a single canvas?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#138

Post by tannhaeuser » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:43 AM UTC

jasonkostempski wrote: post #88

Standards should never have allowed third-party scripts to load without insuppressible user prompts. This cluster-fuck could have been avoided.

What did you expect when the "standards" are specified by an ad company?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#139

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:43 AM UTC

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?

[deleted]

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#140

Post by ChrisGranger » Fri, Sep 01, 2017, 5:45 AM UTC

teolandon wrote: post #122

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #99

I didn't see any ad blocker recommendations in the comments, so I searched and came across a list on Tom's Hardware of the best ad blockers of 2017. The funny part is that Tom's Hardware was FILLED with these exact kind of ads from algovid and adaptv. Even worse, the list is in a carousel / slideshow format so you have to keep clicking if you didn't GTFO like I did.

I'd recommend uMatrix, it can be used to block add, but it can also do so much more. It really helps if you want to disable most JavaScript where you don't need it too. Really great addon.

uMatrix is very powerful, but I feel like its interface might be a bit complicated for less sophisticated users. In the wrong hands, it can really "break" the web.