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by yonkshi 2567 days ago
My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website.

The cost of potentially blocked by ad blockers is finite (A percentage of total revenue), but the cost of ad-fraud is not bounded.
2 comments
callmeal 2567 days ago
>My guess is to prevent ad-fraud by website owners. It's a lot harder to detect fraudulent clicks/impressions if all data are routed through website.

Isn't the solution to that problem a flat rate fee (similar to how advertisements on tv, newspapers and magazines work)?

Instead of a pay-per-click it could be a simple $X dollars and your ad will be visible for Y days/weeks.

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uponcoffee 2567 days ago
I don't see how that would work. If my site gets zero traffic, would I still get paid a flat rate to 'serve' ads? Pay per impression/click works to pay proportionally to individual site traffic and the extent of a campaign.

The current solution is effectively a flat rate as far as an ad campaign is concerned: impressions/$

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michaelt 2567 days ago
People would either (a) pay to place ads on sites they knew had a decent amount of traffic just from reputation, or (b) would hire ad-buying companies which made it their business to know what different sites' ad space is worth.

Needless to say, this could be inconvenient for the adwords-make-me-five-bucks-a-month scale sites. It'd work out OK for the New York Times-es of the world though.

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amelius 2567 days ago
What would happen if browsers simply didn't allow cross domain referencing? Would the web break (and would it be worse than NoScript)?
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laughinghan 2567 days ago
I've thought about this before, since NoScript is too disruptive for me. One issue is that it's common for scripts to served from assets.whateverwebsite.com. I also thought of allowing anything from the same second-level domain (so anything on .whateverwebsite.com), but that would allow anything on .co.uk. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in Chrome I trust, for now.
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naniwaduni 2566 days ago
Sounds like a job for the public suffix list.
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laughinghan 2566 days ago
Ooh, cool, hadn't heard of that before! TIL.

But even with the added complexity of regularly pulling in the public suffix list, the problems keep going: e.g., facebook.com's scripts are all served from static.xx.fbcdn.net.

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