Re:Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
by stevesearer on Monday March 13, 2017 @04:52PM
(#13862236)
As a publisher, I've made the decision to sell advertising in monthly blocks like a magazine would as opposed to an eyeball-based auction system. Anecdotally, I think this deters me from trying to maximize how much money can be made off of every eyeball that visits my website.
I also sell and self-host my own advertising which can only be non-animated jpgs/pngs which gives me ultimate judgement. There is a barrier to entry on this style of ad sales, but overall I feel like it has been worthwhile pursuit so far in the 3 or so years I've been doing it.
Re:Pi-hole – A black hole for Internet advertisements
by derefr on Monday March 13, 2017 @04:58PM
(#13862282)
It can be done relatively simply when you make direct deals with ad agencies or cross-promotion deals with other product companies. The problem is that no ad network wants to be a part of it; and for the little guy, ad networks are the only thing with economies-of-scale large enough to be interested in purchasing your nearly-worthless ad-space.
Thus my view: we need a "catalogue of creative, you pick what you run"-style ad network, so that the little guys have somewhere to turn instead of acquiescing to the existing networks and ending off with their sites showing chumboxes[1].
[1] https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...
I would perhaps say that it's the way that ad networks interact with content sites that's the problem.
With the current "automated just-in-time auction of the eyeballs of the person-we-identified-using-the-site's-metrics, with the site itself just providing the rectangle of space to slot the result into" model, content providers are essentially entirely beholden to whatever the ad network thinks is the best thing to put on their page.
An ad network could instead be a sort of "marketplace" service that lets content providers browse ads from various sources (or get ads suggested to them, using the same algorithm they'd have used originally to force ads on users), and then approve for display the ones they find tasteful/in line with their brand.
That is, after all, the model for running ads in any other medium: the publisher gets to provide ultimate editorial judgement on whether a given ad belongs in their publication.
(Also, in such a model, the content provider would likely be the one hosting the resulting ads, so we'd be able to avoid the whole ads = tracking beacons problem we face today.)