[heroh]

this puts you outside the reach of big ad $, which is moving towards programmatic buying and serving retargeting ads.

You may be able to link up to a big player, but hosting things yourself will require quite a bit of overhead and they pay off may not be worth it, unless you're getting substantial volume (or appealing to a very targeted audience)

btw, traditional display ad CTR is rubbish from an advertisers perspective and we all want to go all in on programmatic + retargeting.

[mahranch]

> this puts you outside the reach of big ad $, which is moving towards programmatic buying and serving retargeting ads.

Not if the big ad companies (google's adsense) create a plugin or program that serves the ads up locally instead of making obvious 3rd party calls to their own networks. I suspect they're working on such a plugin as we speak.

[heroh]

I don't think Google's looking to decentralize in any way shape or form. If anything, they want to know more about a viewer and will be actively fighting to prevent decentralization... especially as it'll break a lot of reporting that advertisers expect.

[mahranch]

> I don't think Google's looking to decentralize in any way shape or form.

I think google's looking to do what's best for their bottom line. If it becomes more profitable, or even much more profitable to decentralize in that way, they will do it without hesitation.

Perhaps they're looking for a way to decentralize their ads, yet still retain the data & meta-data. Basically, have their cake and eat it too.