Re:Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?
by proexploit on Saturday March 06, 2010 @08:44PM
(#1172694)
Although I agree with all of these points, I think relevancy is key. If it's determined by some means that I like "Antique Butter Churns", I'm hardly going to field like the ad to the "Antique Butter Churn Store!" website is actually an ad. I'd consider it a helpful recommendation.
If an ad platform could approach a point of such relevancy that users wouldn't see the ads as advertisements but friendly suggestions, that company would change the way the web works!
2) Make ads relevant. I'm a happily married stay-at-home dad. I'm not interested in dating ads, but ads for better bottles could get my attention. Keyword-driven or site-demographic-driven ads are a start. As dpcan suggested, browsers could allow us to tag ourselves and our interests, which would be even better.
3) Get rid of common annoyances: flashing ads, ads that eat CPU and grind my browser to a crawl, ads on sites I might visit from work or with my kids that aren't safe for work/kids, popups/popunders, ads that block my view of the content I'm looking for, and misleading ads. (Again, if you're a host, vet your ads!)
4) Do not compromise user privacy. Don't track my browsing; base ads off of the site I'm on or information I voluntarily tagged myself with.
Many of the webcomics I read use Project Wonderful, and they seem to have a pretty good model. I regularly see interesting ads, and almost never see offensive ads, scams, or CPU killers.