[trilbyglens]

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does.

If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch that at all because there would be no way to identify them separately from the content.

[stavros]

A smaller company like Hiveworks, for example?

[ccppurcell]

I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basically a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.

[TRiG_Ireland]

Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it died a few years ago.

[piperswe]

RIP Project Wonderful, I loved that it was an ad network that respected privacy

[elsonrodriguez]

Dinosaur Comics I believe.

[JBiserkov]

> there would be no way to identify them separately from the content

We'll use AI