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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

#101

Post by jdangu »

alphapapa wrote: post #92
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,…

Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. > We're on a mission to drive them out of business But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?

Ad security is very weak by design because it allows any fourth-party to serve html/javascript on any website. As long as this is the norm, we'll be around to protect publishers and their audience. Beyond ads, everything we built applies to the web in general so if we ever run out of bad ads, we'll expand in different directions.

edited for clarity

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#102

Post by FridgeSeal »

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?

Seems like that's the idea behind the Brave browser [0]. If I could have some tool that I could put funds into and then frictionlessly pay publishers as I read articles (preferably in a way that didn't let my spending habits be uniquely tracked everywhere) then I would sign up in a heartbeat: I do want to support content producers, don't really want to sign up for n different accounts to do so.

[0]: https://www.brave.com/

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#103

Post by wdr1 »

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'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.

You mean native advertising?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

https://developers.google.com/doubleclick-publishers/docs/na...

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#104

Post by FridgeSeal »

jimjimjim wrote: post #59

whenever there is a problem with ads: assume malice until incompetence is proved.

Yep, especially with the advertising industry: if you give them an inch, they will take a mile.

Unfortunately we're in the annoying position where they view themselves as top-shit and "gods gift to the internet" (and admittedly they do provide monetary support to a lot of things) but I don't think that excuses them from behaving as poorly as they have and do and it's long overdue that they're brought into line.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#105

Post by GhotiFish »

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.

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 jquery we've lost 3s to stupid advertising.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#106

Post by umeshunni »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94
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!

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/guidelines/real-time-bidding-rtb-project... http://sharethrough.com/guides/programmatic-native/

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#107

Post by malchow »

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,…

Great stuff. We do similar work at Publir [1] on behalf of high-traffic news publishers, although we do this largely by maintaining our own exchange. We filter for bad actors on the intake side.

[1] http://publir.com

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#108

Post by aeleos »

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.

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

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#109

Post by brainfire »

iainmerrick wrote: post #100
Spivak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Crackdown by whom? Advertisers and publishers are generally in favor of it, consumers don't care, watchdogs are toothless.

In the US, the FTC. Or do you consider them toothless? It does seem like they're at least making the appearance of trying: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/lord-...

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#110

Post by sdenton4 »

mej10 wrote: post #36
darawk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, using a browser for mining doesn't require the user to have any cryptocurrency, or even know what cryptocurrency is. It also has a similarly opaque cost to them (in the form of electricity).

Brave is getting around that with built-in support for their "Basic Attention Token" which will be rewarded to users just for using their browser. It will be interesting to see how it works out. Personally I am just sad that it takes so much energy to maintain the current cryptocurrency networks and they are already too slow for really interesting stuff -- which is why I wouldn't want to add more waste by mining in a…

That sounds like a great target for automation abuse? Rev up a bunch of virtual machines, each with a bit of attention to distribute.
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