[cheetos]

Fix ads. I think there is a need for a product that allows websites to self-manage their ads, allowing them to handle display, tracking, payment, and client management internally. Imagine being able to get rid of all the third-party ad and tracking scripts on your website in favor of hosting and managing all of it on your own domain, displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive (since you chose them) and setting your own prices.

[arjie]

It's less valuable to advertise a Lego set to a person on a Lego fan site than it is to advertise a car to a person on a Lego fan site who happens to want a car.

I'm a little sceptical of first party content sensitive untargeted advertisement, but we'll see. I also think the people who would block ads would block these too.

See responses to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576611 where people say they will block ads anyway. It's not the tracking. It's not the bandwidth. It's just because it's easy to do.

[aapusaam]

Wasn't this how independent websites use to work before ad networks such as Google ads took over the internet? Problem with managing your own ads is that it would be very hard to get quality relevant ads if you have a small website, not to forget the overhead involved in maintaining ad space without a dedicated ad server.

[RangerScience]

You could maybe do a combination? You feed the add network certain information, it feeds your backend ads - but then you serve the ads, etc etc.

Also, I can't help but be struck by the similarity of "mainframes -> PC -> cloud".

[pookeh]

How about a blockchain based decentralized ad bidding system. Ping me if interested there are plenty of ideas in this lucrative space.

[marktangotango]

No email on your profile...

[davemel37]

> displaying ads that are guaranteed to be relevant and attractive...

Pretty much all the evils in todays ads are a byproduct of the sellers controlling the ecosystem and focusing on their needs over the buyers.(i.e. selling impressions, focusing on pageviews, not reporting on viewability, monetizing data, etc...) This does two terrible things...this makes your ad placements ineffective for 90% of the legit advertisers and only viable to the bad actors selling pills and other spammy/predatory products.

If you want to really fix ads, you need to put the average buyer in the driver seat, you need to make your monetization accountable to your advertisers bottom line, and you need to collaborate on creative design to be beautiful within your site...

As long as publishers and sellers control the marketplace, we are doomed to have clickbait, fake news, ridiculous cookie tracking, and irrelevant ads.

[Kalium]

OpenAds - now OpenX - was this tool for a very long time.

There are a couple of drawbacks. First, it turns out that there's not much money to be made developing that software. Second, it turns out that running it is a lot of work, to the point that it's not worth it for most people. Third, most ad buyers don't want to juggle dozens of small publishers, they want centralization.

[yeukhon]

But that's exactly what 99% of the Google customers are trying to avoid to do. They don't want to handle the management. They don't want to host the ad management platform. They just want a paycheck after the cut (and after all the legal contracts). They just want a tool that works and everyone is familiar with.

[bostik]

Congratulations, you have just identified the core of the problem. Everybody wants to get paid, but not do any of the work required.

I would think this is the main contributor to why we have shitty ads. Everywhere.

[yeukhon]

Yes, it's a shitty problem, but it's because the industry is shit. There must have been extensive studies on ad UX but I see little improvements because so many companies just wanted to sell ads to make $$. Take Forbes and similar new sites - freakin' annoying. But NYT ads are good, at least not as distracting as other news sites seen to be.

Since no one wants to host the ad platform on their own, how do you think you will get your idea across? I think what you really meant is build a better ad platform, not self-hosting ad platform.

[iambateman]

Buysellads is very close to this, and has been around for a long time. I ran beaconads, their subsidiary, for a short time and the biggest issue is that most ad buys are coming from a handful of massive companies.

Old Navy doesn't want to deal individually with a site that doesn't have 10,000,000 visits/month. So we end up needing an intermediary at the same scale as the big advertisers.

Not saying this can't work at some level, just that there are some big economic forces fighting against scaling a product like this.

[sah2ed]

Someone posted a different take on display ads on HN recently [0] called http://pleenq.com/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327125

[arikrak]

One can do that with affiliate advertising to some extent. I don't think it would be easy to use other pricing models since advertisers wouldn't trust small website's metrics. (And large websites already manage their own ads through many different methods.)

[siscia]

Actually I believe the problem is more about relevance...

However I don't see why this problem isn't been solved yet! Just ask what the website is about and serve only ads in the same space would be already a big win...

[herbst]

Also cnaming ad servers do adblocks get useless. Waiting for such a service :3 (and i hope the first good one will have only okish ads)

[navalsaini]

would be cool