The Bullshit Web

Re:The Bullshit Web by themacguffinman on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:02PM (#17658783)

I don't think it's very surprising. Advertisers won't let publishers serve ads directly because that requires trust in publishers to not misrepresent stats like impressions and real views. I don't know how you'd solve that trust problem when publishers are actually incentivized to cheat advertisers.

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Re:The Bullshit Web by smolder on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @09:23PM (#17658889)

I think you may have identified the biggest issue, and it's a shame the pragmatic solution is an unpleasant technical solution.

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Re:The Bullshit Web by SilasX on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @11:21AM (#17663283)

Couldn’t they eg have some trusted proxy server that routes some requests to the real-content NYTimes server and some to the ad server?

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Re:The Bullshit Web by smolder on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @05:45PM (#17667315)

That sounds like a viable solution to the trust issue. They don't need to respond to the requests, just see copies they can be sure are real requests.

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Re:The Bullshit Web by themacguffinman on Thursday August 02, 2018 @01:32AM (#17669406)

For advertisers to trust this proxy server, the NYT cannot control this proxy server to preserve its integrity. So now you're asking the NYT to base their business on an advertiser-controlled server?

What happens when the proxy goes down? What happens when there are bugs? Do you think publishers can really trust advertisers to be good stewards of the publisher's business? Think for a moment about publishers that are not as big as the NYT.

Okay, maybe they do trust an advertiser-controlled proxy server. This means that both tracking scripts and NYT scripts are served from the same domain, meaning they no longer have cross origin security tampering protection. What's stopping the NYT from serving a script that tampers with an advertiser's tracking script?

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Re:The Bullshit Web by SilasX on Thursday August 02, 2018 @02:24PM (#17674059)

Those are issues, but not insurmountable, especially when the benefit is "obviate any adblocker".

They can use a trusted third party to run the proxy and use industry standards/SLAs for site reliability/uptime. And they can still use different subdomains with no obvious pattern (web1.nytimes.com vs web2.nytimes.com -- which is the ad server?) or audit the scripts sent through the proxy for malice.

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