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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

#141
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> serve the most appropriate ad Is it just me, or is this approach not very useful? I'll google for a certain product, do a little bit of research and then buy what I finally picked. Then I'm stuck with seeing ads for similar products for the forseeable future. Ads for a product I already bought and no longer have an interest in. I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fi…

> I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fits the page I'm currently looking at without being personalized.

There's a gap: Getting search/retargeting interest information is almost instant, but finding out you've purchased is hard and takes time.

However it's effective enough: Retargeting boosts most verticals by as much as 3-5x, and where that one click pays $1 the ads cost about $3 per thousand to display them.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#142
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fake video preroll ad placements Can you explain this further? Who is getting defrauded here?

Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#143

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

I know what you're saying, but think about things like jquery that every site uses. It's reasonable to source it remotely because everyone has it cached. Unless you had some content ID system in the browsers to pull locally sourced scripts up, we'd lose that instant CDN effect. That said. It's hard to compare the benefits of that to the cost of the nonsense in OP's story. For every 50ms we've gained from cached jquer…

My experience (as a uMatrix user -- I get to manually whitelist domains all the time) is that most sites host their own copy of jquery anyway. And the sites that download scripts from external domains are usually the worst offenders -- they download a crapton of things from external domains, definitely not in my cache. As in they probably couldn't care less about performance. Name resolution often takes longer than it would take to serve these request first hand.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#144
post #142
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

Firefox Mobile, uBlock Origin.

Adblockers are here.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#145
post #77

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

This may actually explain why watching videos in the browser sometimes causes the computer to heat up comparably to a new AAA gaming title.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#146
post #108

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.

If you are still looking for an ad blocker, I have had great experiences with ublock origin.

I also think this is the common suggestion on HN for a year or two now.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a great article on Searchengineland about it but I can't find it now. And it was originally patented by GoTo[1] and Google was sued by Overture[2] with mixed results[3]. It did give Yahoo! which owned Overture at the time some Google stock (2.7M shares).[4] (Which, interestingly enough, if they had held would be worth more than $2B today) [1] https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361 [2] https://www.c…

The ad auctions that happen on Google (and Yahoo etc) are a simpler version of what happens on the web since there's only one publisher (i.e Google) and a single 'ad network' (i.e. AdWords). On the web, there are multiple publishers, served by multiple ad networks and multiple exchanges (and it's turtles all the way down) Nowadays, bidding on the web happens through the OpenRTB protocol. See https://www.iab.com/guide…

I am constrained by the non-disclosure I signed when I left Google from disclosing how I know this, but I know that the auctions on Google are "not a simpler version" :-).

That said, I think IAB's efforts to make auction priced advertising available to people who don't use Google's ad network is commendable.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#148
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,…

The only good ad is a dead one.

With very few exceptions, especially in the consumer space, you won't need advertising if you actually need something. You'll search it out or your friends will tell you what to buy.

Advertising serves as a way for the capitalist class to exert veto power over other aspects of society by yanking funding at opportune moments (see the current Google snafu or Bill O'Reilly's departure from FOX (which was an example of this power being used for good indirectly via public pressure)). It also allows for shows of dominance, strength, and to move fucking product by creating an awareness moat vs your competitors. This means that people often already know they want to buy something, but they'll pick you instead of the other one which is fundamentally different from advertising performing a public service.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#150
post #142
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone feels the pain: Publisher gets paid on a $1 CPM basis while Cedato gets paid $5-10 CPM and pockets the difference. Advertiser thinks they paid for quality video content preroll but it's actually a tiny rectangle normally used for "display" ads. Audience is infuriated. Think about what happens on a 4G mobile plan now that VPAID has been fully migrated from Flash to JS...

And you can't even install ad blockers on the phone.

My iPhone has them just fine, and Android being less locked down makes me think it probably does too
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