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VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

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Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#161
What it comes down to for me is this: businesses don't have some god-given right to exist. If you can't get people to give money to your business enough to at least cover your costs, then your business should go out of business.

If we enter into a business relationship, I will pay you for a good or service that you want. I will be obligated to do so because we came to an agreement in which you provide me the good or service and I give you money. But I'm not obligated to pay you money if I don't want to, and in turn, you wouldn't be obligated to provide me with your good or service. If not enough people give you money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business.

If you enter into a business relationship with an advertiser, good luck. That has nothing to do with me. I get that you came to an agreement with the advertiser in which you provide them with ad viewers and they give you money, but it's not my responsibility to help you hold up your end of the bargain by viewing ads. At best advertisers are wasting my attention to try to sell me something I don't want or need. At worst, they're lying to me, collecting my private data, installing malware on my devices. Advertising is almost universally reprehensible. I want nothing to do with them. If advertisers don't pay you enough money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running a business.

Of course, if I don't view your ads, you aren't obligated to provide me with your good or service. I fully support sites that use anti-adblocking banners. I mean I support them morally, not financially; if I come across such a banner I'll leave.

There are arguments about whose responsibility it is when ads do reprehensible things: is it the ad network or the publisher? This strikes me as similar to arguing whether the hit man or the person who hired him is responsible. Don't take money to do reprehensible things and you won't have this problem.

There's also an argument floating around that ads are the only things that makes quality content possible. This is obviously false: I remember the 90s and content was better pre-advertising. Sheldon Brown's website[1] is still the best website if you want to choose a bike that fits your needs. Erowid[2] is still the best resource for information on drug harm reduction. And decades of development have only made things better for non-ad models: even without a packaged solution like Patreon it's not hard to include donations or paid subscriptions on your website.

Yes, some businesses will not survive the transition to non-ad models, but we have good reason to believe that the BuzzFeeds and Gawkers of the world will be disproportionately represented in that number. I'm looking forward to it.

[1] http://sheldonbrown.com/

[2] https://www.erowid.org/

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the only standing ones would be site owners who care enough to make sure they don't allow malware on their visitor from their site. What's the problem?

Because that's not how the world works. You'd jail 99.999% of publishers and the only ones not jailed would be ones who don't have any advertising.

Sounds great to me. People only publishing what they want others to read, no clickbait, absolutely marvellous.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#163
post #150

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

what about fraud?

As in? Both views and clicks can still be tracked so fraud will have to be dealt with in the same way as it is right now.

If you are saying that fraud is harder to detect without building user profiles, that might be so. But it's not impossible.

If you are saying that ads can be changed into clickbait I guess you'll have find a way to deal with that. I think an ad network should have an active relationship with both advertisers and publishers and not the anonymous, fully automated, crappy relationship Google has right now.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#164
post #158

This whole thing would actually be technically quite easy to solve: just introduce new attribute to iframe, say f.ex. you could have traffic-limit="10MB", and request-limit="5". Browser would block the iframe and anything that runs in it cold, if it exceeds limits. In an ad-auction one would sell the ad space with the knowledge of those limits. Publisher would have perfect control on how heavy ads they allow on their…

Wouldn't it be easy to just...

     var iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
     iframe.src = '(ad url here)';
     document.body.appendChild(iframe);
For every new ad?

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#165

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

Or perhaps, all ads are just plain html... no scripts or videos.

Ideally, this would be a choice for the publisher. I spent a lot of time making my pages fast, so I would not request video ads.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#166
post #153

What I would like in a new kind of Ad network: - all ads are responsive HTML5 ads - all resources are loaded over HTTPS - ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user - ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the expiration date - if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad…

If each site creates a CNAME (ex: ads.example.com or not-ads.example.com or more likely [a-z][a-z0-9]{15}.example.com) pointing at the ad broker, they could use something like letsencrypt to dynamically set up HTTPS.

Just like CDN77 does with their CDN.. Great example of using Letsencrypt to move the web forward.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#167
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of niche forums - games, hobbies and so forth are unlikely to monetise any other way. Should they die too? Or have to rely on a rich benefactor deciding to host a motorcycling (or whatever) site? Few are going to pay a subscription to chat on a Civilization or fishing forum a few hours a week. Advertising should be the appropriate model for this. Trouble is it's being poisoned by the greed of Buzzfeed and W…

Come on, hosting a simple website/forum is really cheap nowadays. Some websites (wikipedia being the main one) simply ask for donations at the end of the year.

Yes it is, but plenty of sites have struggled to get donations, and disappeared as a result - Wikipedia is a bit exceptional on that score.

I don't begrudge people trying to make a bit of pocket money from their sites either. They often put quite a few hours of admin after all, but as is, advertising is fairly broken - for everyone it seems.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#169
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so blatantly sexist and wrong it's almost funny again. Have you considered that it's blatantly sexist and right ? I.e., that perhaps no-one programmed the ad network to associate sewing kits with handbags, makeup & high-heeled shoes, that perhaps the ad serving AIs learnt that on their own? I wonder what we'll do when our AIs come to socially-unacceptable-but-true conclusions. Humans can be brow-beaten or pers…

> Have you considered that it's blatantly sexist and right? I buy an average of a hundred items on Amazon a year, among them all my – male – clothes. Your algorithms are just plain shit when a single purchase five years ago is somehow weighed more than the whole rest.

The algorithm guesses that your wife is doing the ordering, and is targeting her.

Re: VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks

#170
This is exactly why I have JavaScript turned off on mobile and selectively for some desktop site (politico nd salon are two examples of ba actors).

As a die hard JavaScript guy, I hate doing this. The performance gains have been so large that I dont miss JavaScript any more. There are a few sites that demand it and I make the determination whether or not to enable JavaScript based on how badly I want to read or do whatever is at that site.

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