[tempestn]

"I think that we need to hold the web sites accountable for the content that they display. If browsers get infected by ads at Forbes or people buy knock-off watches from ads at Yahoo, then we need people to sue Forbes and Yahoo. Remember: these web sites authorized the placement of the ad on their web page."

So effectively what you're saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network. So in order to be safe from lawsuits, publishers would have to go back to directly contracting with advertisers for every ad. Certainly there would be some benefits to that in terms of reduced low quality ads. The problem is, the added overhead of doing so would put many small publishers out of business. Dealing with individual advertisers is a huge job, with massive economies of scale; it just doesn't make sense for websites that are orders of magnitude smaller than Forbes and Yahoo.

[belorn]

Lets look at other media and see if your conclusion is correct. Do TV networks vet, produce and handle the ad-client and ad-publisher relationship, or do they mainly interact through marketing firms? The answer: they work mainly through marketing firms. The TV network is still ultimately responsible for the content they broadcast, as dictated by law.

Do newspaper work with individual advertisers, or do they work mostly through local marketing firms? The answer is again the same as above. Buying a news ad is commonly done through a marketing firm and the news paper is always responsible for what is printed.

Very few publisher in any media deals with individual advertise clients, and yet it works. Responsibility is done through contracts, through professional liability and standards, and as last resort through business insurance. As a result, its quite uncommon to see illegal ads on physical newspapers, on TV, on busses, and on other physical objects.

[tempestn]

Are you sure there aren't scams advertised in newspapers and on TV? The main reason you see more scams online though isn't (only) because of inferior vetting. It's mostly because online ads are much cheaper than TV, so the economics work out better for the scammers. Same reason you get more spam in your inbox than your mailbox. (And there are plenty of shady classified ads in newspapers. You probably don't see them because like most of us, you don't read newspapers.)

Now, they do also do more manual vetting, but they can afford to, because again, the ads cost more. Maybe online ads need to cost more too. It just means that some fraction of the current legitimate advertisers will no longer have sustainable business models.

[belorn]

In Sweden where i live, a TV station that would repeatably broadcast illegal ads would loose their license. They would not be allowed to use the radio frequencies, and would loose millions from such outcome. When government agency that deal with TV broadcast makes a decision, or the consumer protection agency (a other government branch), they do listen.

Almost a decade ago, ads about subscription services went through a major change. The government dislike how "free" was used in services where all the costs was hidden in the fine print. As such, all ads related to subscriptions was changed so the the total price must be very explicit in the ad. The TV, news papers and street advertisement immediately changed as a result, mostly by stopping having advertisement for such services. They were afterward put back once marketing firms learned how to stay compliant with the decision.

Even further back in history there was a ruling against advertisement that targeted children, where there was one particular channel that went a bit further than everyone else. After the ruling, they stopped.

Now, one could assume that the sword is only dangling above the TV networks and the news papers are running wild with scamming advertisement. Except that I can find rulings (by the consumer protection agency) that target advertisement in print. A ruling in 2003 made a decision against a home catalog, ordering the company to stop printing a style of advertisement (about weight control) or face a fine of $40000 per issue.

Sweden don't have much general classified ads in newspapers, so I guess that might answer why I don't see so many shady versions. Jobs ads are done through the government job agency, and selling things through newspapers tend to be quite expensive so its almost exclusively about cars, boats or houses. Criminals tend to target cheap alternatives so that a failed attempt has less of a sunk cost, which means those who has no vetting process and minimal investment.

[sdrothrock]

> So effectively what you're saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network.

Or you could have ad networks that only circulate carefully vetted/curated ads.

Imagine if you had an ad network that was picky and only allowed ads that were clever/interesting, short, not annoying, and didn't lead to malicious/fake products!

[tempestn]

Most of the good ad networks today (like Adsense) try very hard to do this already. The problem is that it's not easy. For instance, how do you stop a malicious advertiser from creating a legitimate looking ad that points to a legitimate looking page, then redirecting it to a different page after the ad is vetted? What if it only redirects for certain IP address ranges? And that's just one example of a technique a malicious advertiser could use. None of the top tier networks want malicious ads on their platforms. The problem is that it's difficult to remove them.

Also, even if you could catch everything with manual human vetting of every ad, it would be cost-prohibitive. (Either you would have to pay less to publishers, or charge more to advertisers. The latter would likely be a non-starter, because it is already difficult for most small advertisers to run positive ROI campaigns. The former would put further pressure on publishers, making them even less likely to accept the risk of these proposed lawsuits.)

I would love to see online advertising improved, and I think there are certainly possible ways to go about it. I'm just trying to illustrate that it's not as easy as, "don't let people publish or distribute bad ads."

To borrow the analogy from the article, we couldn't stop spam by going after the email providers for allowing it through.

[zwetan]

"Or you could have ad networks that only circulate carefully vetted/curated ads."

No, you make it simpler than that

you simply forbid ads to be interactive or to contain any code

eg. you do only static ads like text, image, video

no code, no way to hide nasty stuff

[hackerfactor]

Your proposed approach will stop direct risks to browsers, but does nothing for ads that link to web pages that are hostile. E.g., you click on an ad because you are interested in the product and get directed to a phishing site or a site offering counterfeit goods or a site that has malware and infects your browser.

It's not just the graphic used by the ad, it's also the ad's destination.

[manigandham]

We solve all this by having a platform that syndicates sponsored content directly to the user. They click but stay on a rendered page controlled by us. No 3rd party assets or destination to worry about.

[jarcane]

So disable linking.

The clickthrough rate on internet ads is execrable. Frequently in the fractions of a percent at best.

No other advertising space operates on the assumption that linking represents.

Eliminating linking and leaving pure visual ads would be in line with every other form of advertising in existence, and eliminate the "problem" of click fraud, link-bait, and actually fraudulent links.

Do we really need a business model that exists largely to enable ad networks to defraud each other and consumers? We have advertising standards bodies that are meant to prevent this kind of thing in every other form of advertising, but somehow the internet is "special"?

[marvy]

So you end up with ads that say: copy/paste this URL. What have you solved?

[jarcane]

I think realistically, the friction against such a method is strong. People can scarcely be arsed to bother with QR-codes anymore. It could still happen, but this sounds an awful lot like a "perfect is the enemy of the good" sort of argument. Is not some X% of the problem better than the 100% that we have now?

[manigandham]

Our ad network does this. It works. The problem is that the larger global ad industry doesn't have much regulation or enforcement so it's very easy to run scams and nobody gets in trouble for it. The infrastructure players don't care since they make money on volume, not quality.

Basic incentives - until they're fixed nothing will change.

[anonymousab]

> So in order to be safe from lawsuits, publishers would have to go back to directly contracting with advertisers for every ad.

Or they would be forced to seek agreements with ad networks to cover such faults. Insurance, in some form.

[tempestn]

Right. I actually considered that when writing the post, then didn't end up mentioning it. I suppose that's possible, although I find it unlikely that large ad networks would indemnify small publishers in that way. Perhaps if they felt they had no alternative though.

[bigbugbag]

> So effectively what you're saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network.

Isn't that what google did when facing the need to monetize their search engine ?