[nopriorarrests]

I know a bit about modern ad-tech.

Ads absolutely need networking capabilities, for tracking stuff like "viewability", or "anti-fraud, brand safety and independent measurement" by some third-party provider. In fact, you can't get serious marketing budget from reputable brand without having your, err... their ad wrapped inside some JS which does networking calls. Brands want to audit each impression you, as ad-tech firm, will serve on their behalf.

[e1ven]

Part of what I find frustrating as a user is that I don't like ANY of those features :)

While I'd prefer a model without any advertising (and am willing to pay for it), I can put up with unobtrustive ads, without tracking, like Daringfireball uses.

I've worked in adtech before, and I know that these techniques make money, and are important to advertisers. But as a user, I find them intrusive, and they are why I run adblockers.

[nopriorarrests]

Yeah, race to the bottom. Fraud in online advertising estimated to be tens of billions USD yearly, so brands require more and more "brand safety" and "measurements", each ad calls, like, 4 different vendors calculating some metrics, and this, in turn, fuels adblockers growth.

Interestingly enough, "walled gardens", like facebook, are big and important enough to bully advertisers into playing by facebook rules, accepting FB measurement standards, without calls to 3rd party vendors.

It's only open web which is polluted more and more each year.

[stevenwoo]

Shouldn't Google be big enough to bully advertisers into the same sort of deal? It seems like a business opportunity for Google here.

[nopriorarrests]

Well, it's a complicated question, and I'm not that well educated.

To my best knowledge...

1. You can't make a single cent if your bot visited facebook.com 100 million times. You can make some serious money if your bot visited some-exciting-domain.com, which belongs to you, and there was 5 ads displayed on each visit.

With this incentive you have all the reasons to make your bot very human-like (think headless chrome, realistic mouse movements, having old cookies, etc) so fighting fraud gets extremely hard.

It's easier to serve the ads and let advertiser figure out anti-fraud measures by himself. Being responsible for measurements and lack of fraud on open web is a huge PITA without clear path to huge uplift in revenue.

2. Facebook optimizes UX (or claims to), and calls to other servers make site slower, especially on mobile, lowering user engagement. This argument obviously does not work for some-exciting-domain.com. So, you can call whatever your want from your ad on some-exciting-domain.com, but on facebook.com you play by facebook rules.

In fact, some-exciting-domain.com can probably ban ads which call other domains, but it will just kill his revenue (programmatic systems will label him as "non-performing", because nothing is properly measured and stop buying ads there).

[chiefalchemist]

> "It's only open web which is polluted more and more each year."

Is water still polluted if more and more and more are willing to chug it?

[nopriorarrests]

I do not think that metaphor holds at all, if "water" is open web and "chugging" means spending advertising dollars there.

I don't have a link on hand, but GOOG and FB captured something like 95% of digital advertisement growth in 2017. In other words, out of each new 1$ shifted to digital from TV and print, 95 cents went to duopoly.

And advertisers which are still "chugging" open web, installing more and more "filters" and "purifiers" (different anti-fraud and measurement providers).

People from digital media are talking about digital media crash. [0] Buzzfeed failed their revenue goal and fired 100 employees. [1] Mashable was sold for peanuts. [2] Business Insider, granddady of ad-monetized clickbait, pushing more and more articles under "BI Prime", which means paid access.

A lot of people were clamoring for death of ad-supported publishing on open web. Well, the future is almost here.

[0] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-... [1] https://www.recode.net/2017/11/29/16715350/buzzfeed-lays-off... [2] https://www.recode.net/2017/12/5/16735262/ziff-davis-mashabl...

[chiefalchemist]

Chugging means, the general public is not at all concerned about what it's being subjected to - be it privacy / tracking or the visual pollution of ads.

If the market is the decider then I think the market is saying - quite loudly - the water is great to drink.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> Business Insider, granddady

Now I feel like Methuselah, who played with dinosaurs before the Ark.

[keldaris]

As a user I love all of those features. Every single one of them makes my adblockers more effective, not to mention they drive more people to use adblockers. :)

[tinus_hn]

Ads absolutely do not need this. One day these capabilities will be taken from the networks and they will survive.

The advertisers will take anything they can. It’s up to others to set the limits.

[nopriorarrests]

Will be taken by who? As long as we have publishers and adnetworks allowing this behaviour, money will flow there.

[tinus_hn]

The audience is clawing back their rights using ad blockers and the browser vendors are already limiting tracking by eliminating apis used for tracking and limiting cookies.

Ultimately the browser vendors and the users make the rules, not advertisers.

[chii]

but one of the biggest browser is owned by one of the biggest advertisers in the world. you'd expect dive conflict of interest at best, and anticompetitive behaviour at worst, from them.