[mozumder]

For better results, have that intern gather the email addresses of those 12,000 pre-approved sites, and email them a personal ad placement buy offer, or request a media kit.

You'll find all sorts of personalization opportunities and you get to cut out the middle-man.

[rtpg]

and now have 12000 billing portals to manage? 12000 different sites to update every time you update your ads?

[idunno246]

actually a lot of them still use google, which can also run private deal ads.

[mozumder]

Yes. This is how it was done during the magazine era.

[rtpg]

Rarely. It was usually an ad agency that would do the actual deals to get things into magazines.

You could always contact a single magazine, but big corporations would let their ad agency handle distribution

[adrianN]

Did anybody advertise in 12000 magazines?

[mozumder]

If you include international magazines and newspapers, then yes.

[imaginenore]

Just give them your ad code (a JS snippet), this way you control your ads.

Billing is a solved problem too, no?

[dpark]

> Billing is a solved problem too, no?

No. Billing is a huge pain in the ass. Negotiating price with each site is a huge pain in the ass. Building a reliable JS snippet that works everywhere and that these sites will trust is also a huge pain in the ass. Everything about dealing with 5k sites manually is a pain in the ass, which is why ad networks exist in the first place.

[rhizome]

It's kind of interesting that self-hosted direct advertising hasn't taken off as a technical problem to solve.

[corin_]

Because that's a business problem, the technical side of it was solved a long time ago.

[rhizome]

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Are you saying that there exists direct advertising libraries for web development frameworks and CMSes, and that they've possibly been around for a long time?

[corin_]

Sorry for the slow reply. I'm not familiar with currently available frameworks/etc. so I can't speak to that side.

The point I intended to make is that, in my experience, there aren't site owners going "I wish I could do this if only it wasn't so technically hard", they're going "I wish I could do this if only it didn't mean people would spend less money with me". Because on the other side of the equation, ad buyers (generally, though obviously not universally) don't want to work that way, and they're the ones with the money and therefore the power.

I'm not a developer myself but I've worked with developers who created various in-house ad-tech, and while this sort of thing may be too complicated to do for Mr Random Joe Blogger without a CMS plugin, it's really not something that is too technically complicated to be feasible.