[fixermark]

I get the distinct impression, in the war of ads vs. consumer, that some people will not be satisfied until they've submarined advertising all the way down to sponsored content and we have to go way out of our way to notice that the Try Guys are always drinking Coca-Cola or something.

[manigandham]

There will always be those fringe people who insist on content being valueless even though they consume hours of it.

The greater problem is that the ad industry is too unregulated and greedy which has led to a tragedy of the commons with malware and poor UX everywhere, leading to adblockers installed by many who otherwise wouldn't mind.

[KozmoNau7]

If someone puts content out there for free, it is by definition freely available, and I decide 100% which content I want my browser to accept and show, and which content to ignore.

If you want to make sure you get paid for your content, put it behind a paywall. Yes, the number of users will drop, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

Otherwise, ask nicely for donations or Patreon support or do old-fashioned sponsored content, obviously with full disclaimers that the content is sponsored, so people can decide whether they want to watch it or not.

Specifically talking about video ads, look at what Glenn Fricker from Spectre Media Group does on his Youtube channel. He often gets demonitized because he tends to swear a lot. So he asks people to "spend a buck, give a fuck" on Patreon, and he does short sponsor midway interludes in his videos. It's always a short clip of himself talking about the product or service in question, and it's always something he uses himself, he won't advertise something he can't vouch for. So you don't get the jarring cuts to some random ad agency's standard BS video that runs on thousands of un-related videos.

That's how to do it. Part of and related to the channel's content, but also clearly demarcated and made fully clear that it is sponsorship/advertising. And most importantly: No tracking!

[portroyal]

> I decide 100% which content I want my browser to accept and show, and which content to ignore.

Devil's Advocate says the people who make your browser reduce 100% to maybe 60%. Browser extensions are the 10%.

[KozmoNau7]

Depends on which browser and which add-on loadout you use.

On Firefox, with appropriate small changes and with uBlock Origin, uMatrix and a few other add-ons, you bet I can adequately control the data accepted by my browser.

If you use Chrome, well that's another situation. Don't use Chrome.

[ozzmotik]

>implying there is no tracking when watching a video on a Google owned platform

[KozmoNau7]

Use a VPN, use a private window, never log in.

I posted an example of how advertising could be done in a more sensible way, not a ridiculous claim that Google doesn't track everything they possibly can.

[ozzmotik]

i mean my comment wasn't trying to imply that was what you were suggesting. it was more along the lines of suggesting that in video organic and sponsored ads by content creators isn't going to stop you from being tracked. even with a VPN, a private window, and staying logged out, they can still likely fingerprint you so you better use noscript too! the point is there's no way to not be tracked short of removing the things that facilitate the tracking in the first place.

[hombre_fatal]

I think the biggest problem is that ads have given us a culture where people expect everything to be free which makes it really hard to compete with ads.

The malware stuff is a cherry on top, but not the main issue.

[alkonaut]

I'm hoping for a revival of dumb ads. That large sites such as major newspapers will have ads like they had in the 90:s - internal ad sales departments spending long hours making ad contracts with advertisers who will trust and/or audit the traffic.

[noneeeed]

Likewise. I've always been curious as to just how significant an impact all this behavioural ad-serving actually has on the impact of their marketing budget. We assume that things like AdSense must provide better ROI than simple dumb placement of ads, but I'd love to know if that is actually true over the long term, and if so just how much better it is. For example, it might work well in the short term for certain things, but at the expense of long-term broarder brand awareness perhaps.

However I suspect it would be fiendishly difficult to work out the effect over anything other than the immediate short term (i.e. impression to click to sale).

If anyone knows of some good experimental work on this I'd love to read it.

[yowlingcat]

I'd love to read some good experimental work on it as well. Off the top of my head, I can guess that there's some benefit to retargeting ads up to a point -- if you can show an ad sequence over time, there's probably an argument to be made that the spaced repetition is more effective than just showing the same ad over and over again, for certain kinds of ads. Then again, that gets back to ad design in and of itself -- a clever campaign could go viral and/or engage in a way an A/B optimized campaign with a poor concept probably never will. With something that's part art/game theory/design and part data, I'm really curious as to how you could even design a reasonably lossless experiment to accomplish this.

[lapnitnelav]

This isn't just about trusting the traffic, it's about being able to optimize which creative is the most effective, what's the optimal threshold of #ads served for a user to convert - and conversely, being able to not overspend on someone who's clearly not interested.

The other part of that is those kinds of ads (dumb ads as you say) are going to be mostly useful for branding. Which is fine when you are Apple or Coke, but if you're a smaller player, you'd rather make sure your ads only get in front of the right eyeballs.

[alkonaut]

Yeah - What I want is effectively having the effect that no small site can have ads and no small business will advertise. It would also likely mean the death of more than half the sites and content on the internet, as well as the loss of millions of jobs in the ad industry and at those sites. And I still hope it happens.

[lapnitnelav]

Well actually I think it's going to be different.

SMBs will only leverage Google, Facebook and other big platforms because I believe they'll have the ability to keep being relevant given their "walled-garden" model despite GDPR-like legal framework.

Every small publisher, aka 99% of them will likely collapse one way or another.

As counter intuitive as it might seem, while this would hurt their bottom line, Google and FB would benefit the most from this.

I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(

[alkonaut]

> I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(

That would be great. I think browsers could push this. A simple standard data structure that people volonteer to provide for themselves. If I want "relevant ads" I populate it thuroughly and honestly. If I don't want that, I don't populate it at all, or even ask my browser to randomize it. But info used for targeting it should be info that the browser (i.e. user) provides and not info that the industry scrapes together.

Second: identity. I think step one must be making sure users can't be tracked or fingerprinted. Browser vendors need to make absolutely 100% sure that no font rendering or other fingerprinting can be used.

Obviously point #2 means that point #1 can't be too detailed, or can't be transferred verbatim every time. If you have narrow enough interests you can be fingerprinted.

[tomjen3]

Right now big ad is a fleet of dreadnaughts. If we can get them down to a level of submarines that is an improvement, as they are easier to kill.

[monochromatic]

Would that be so bad? What’s wrong with contextual advertising instead of invasive user tracking?

[dspillett]

>that some people will not be satisfied until they've submarined advertising all the way down to sponsored content

Ish.

The key problem that made me give in and start blocking is the lack of accountability/responsibility and the fact that one bad player (or hacked player) can affect many sites at once. Too many times I saw drive-by install attempts, camera/mic access attempts, pop-ups/unders, and so forth, on large popular sites via their adverts. imgur.com was one of the worst offenders at the time, and the final straw, but it was far from uncommon elsewhere too. I got tired of the official response being either "yeah, our ad partners had a problem, nothing we could do, it won't happen again, until next time" or simply complete ignorance.

At least with server-side insertion on the site/apps own servers it gives them more control (and forces them to take responsibility). If they serve a malware ridden ad from their own resources then they are responsible, no one else, and had the control to not do it. They are no longer trusting a 3rd party to be safe without having any audit rights to make sure they are. Currently they add JS/iframes/both from the ad provider and have no control over what goes in there. The ad provider is probably a "network" which farms out the content via redirects/other to yet another party, who may include content that they themselves haven't properly checked. There is no practical way to make that safe, but I'm not willing to accept the risk by not blocking the ads. Server-side insertion may be the practical alternative. It doesn't solve all the privacy/tracking issues of course, the site/app can still collect that data and forward it back to the advertiser, but current ad blocking can't stop that anyway and SSAI does take a hit at the malware & UI dark-pattern issues (from their PoV by giving them better control of what their site serves and from our PoV by meaning use of the shitty "it was someone else, our server did nothing" is even less defensible so they have to use that control to be better if they want to be trusted).

Of course there is a problem with this that I'm sure the ad industry will jump on if CSAI becomes problematical: MitM SSAI. The ad network provides a CDN which your viewers connect to instead of you directly and that inserts the advert/tracker/malware/other on the way through. I'll cost them more due to bandwidth requirements, but it would work for sites/apps that aren't massively latency sensitive, and would let them try enforce exclusivity if the method becomes a common one (by refusing to accept or make connections to other MitM SSAI providers they could reduce in-page competition). Though again, to get around SSAI blocking they still have to keep the source close to them, reducing the farming out of responsibility that we currently see.

[gruez]

>At least with server-side insertion on the site/apps own servers it gives them more control (and forces them to take responsibility). If they serve a malware ridden ad from their own resources then they are responsible, no one else, and had the control to not do it. They are no longer trusting a 3rd party to be safe without having any audit rights to make sure they are.

You're greatly overestimating how much publishers care about security. If they're already willing to embed arbitrary scripts from ad networks (which has full access to the page), why wouldn't they go one step further and proxy it from their servers? It's not like it's giving additional access. I also don't buy the "additional responsibility" aspect. At the end of the day, it's still an ad network, and unless they're manually approving each ad, the risk of malware/scams isn't going to change, and if they happen to display such an ad, they can still deflect blame to the ad network.

[dspillett]

> they can still deflect blame to the ad network

Agreed. But it is at least far easier to definitively prove that they are the reason the malware was delivered to a given user. It is perhaps a naive hope, but maybe that and the threat of potential bad publicity (or just being more likely to be included in popular "bad host" block-lists) will encourage a little more due diligence.

> You're greatly overestimating how much publishers care about security.

Oh, my expectations are low. I think more that I'm looking for/at things that might force them to care more than they currently do.

[jessedhillon]

Once a revolution starts, it doesn't stop until it eats itself.