[always_good]

CloudFlare is in an incredible position for advertising since they are a proxy.

Imagine just dropping a tag like this onto your page:

    <display-ad width="300" height="250">

And CloudFlare scans your page to figure out the genre of ad to display, does the live auction, and replaces it with a real ad. Now imagine that for non-display ads like injected content.

Meanwhile even Google has to crawl your Adsense pages to know what sort of content to serve. And they have to worry about things like websites serving different content to GoogleBot. Some interesting possibilities when you're proxying all of a website's traffic.

Even if Adsense let you render ads server-side by proxying user info to them, that's a lot more work for every website owner compared to what CloudFlare could enable since it already is the proxy.

Or imagine CloudFlare encoding live-auctioned ads directly into your videos on demand as part of the video stream itself.

[usrusr]

And you did not even mention the biggest difference to the conventional model: those ads would be indistinguishable from regular content on the network level. Good luck trying to get an ad blocker to remove your personalized "message from our sponsors" from the picture of a kitten you wanted to see when it is watermarked right into the JPEG.

[shimon_e]

If I owned Cloudflare this is the direction I'd go. Ads without the MBs of bloat that existing ad networks add.

As a cloudflare customer and an everyday internet I am thankful cloudflare hasn't gone in this direction.

[dx034]

On the other hand, ads that load as simple images would be a big step forward compared to the current situation where rendering ads can max out a CPU.

[dbbk]

I believe this is exactly the sort of thing they're pursuing with CloudFlare Apps.