I'm beginning to find the various articles about ad-blocking fatuous, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model.
Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armies of IT folks to actively work against you.
Maybe the business model is that you're serving ads in a non-centralized way, or maybe you're serving centralized ads to people with locked-down computers, but good luck serving blockable ads and relying on the good graces of the population to unblock your ads out of charity.
Websites offering self hosted, static advertising isn't so much of a problem as random bits of javascript and tracking cookies loaded from god knows where every time you load a page. Harder to block, the advertiser needs to pass their content through the hoster which assures some level of quality and relevance, and some level of privacy for the end viewers.
> Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model.
Uhm, no, you could say that about a million things to dismiss it as unimportant and "just do it".
Similarly, I've wondered why advertisers don't just change how they do the ads: if the ads are non-standard size, are non animated, and link back to a legit landing page from non/shady domain, what adblocker covers that? Wouldn't that just look like ordinary site content? Or do they really update them that quickly and narrowly?
I would expect to see a code snippet on host sites which does a bit of pass-through disguising, so that what used to be "iframe src=skeezy_virus_mill.ru" looks local. That seems consistent with the arms race in progress...
Some sites do this already. Either with a locally hosted snippet or by doing a CNAME in their DNS that points to the third party so it looks like it's from the same domain.
But why can't they arrange some alternate setup where the main site serves the ads (relaying the ads from another server) rather than the ad network? It would be roughly the same effort from the site owner.
Serving on the main site leaves the attribution for views/click throughs in the hands of the site owner, who may or may not tell the truth about the success of the ads.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to work this out though, it's likely that they are more complex or more unreliable than what already exists, or nobody has thought of a better way that meets the needs of 1) advertisers 2) ad networks 3) content providers in a practical way.
If anyone comes up with such a system, it may do well, but then again, you'd have to get that system adopted somehow.
Ads and reliable counting should be possible to provide from the content providers site. Tracking/identification is optional. The question is just: if it's the only choice available, would advertisers want to pay for non-individualized ads being shown to all visitors, without any chance of click-through counts?
My guess is: initially no. But eventually? Why not? All we did then was turn web advertising into what it was from the beginning - print ads on a screen.
Because the main site owner then has to spend time coordinating with literally thousands of advertisers to get their ads for their champagnes. They then have a build an maintain an adverser that is hosted in their domain, right now ad servers you buy are hosted in a separate domain.
This also eliminates the possibility of do programatic buying of ads, think Ad Words. Large companies have the money to spend on this, they don't because they don't have to. What you are suggesting would cut every small company out of the advertising space.
They would just have to agree on a common protocol for the advertiser to pass back what what each bit of ad content looks like. It wouldn't prevent programmatic buying of ads, as you could still forward over the cookies, user data, and other information submitted with request and the advertiser could still condition the ad on this information.
>What you are suggesting would cut every small company out of the advertising space.
I'm confused by your phrasing: I was suggesting a countermeasure, not mandating something that would cut people out of any market. And it would certainly be hard now, because there isn't a common interface for setting up the ad relaying, but that's exactly how thing were in the early web: having an ad provider place ads on your site required a custom[1] solution until there was a common way of doing it.
I think it's because the ad-networks don't want to trust the site owners. Which is understandable since there are colliding interests between advertisers, site owners, users and ad-networks.
In principle: If you pirate movies or the GPL, the legal system comes after you. So no, not completely broken.
But that's my point: Those industries have taken the path of serving the subsegment of the market that won't break the law/contract. And maybe that's the answer for website advertising, but adblockers are a one-time install and look like less effort than pirating (for movies) or obfuscating (for GPL). So good luck if that's your business model.
In both of your example cases, there are actual legal protections. In the case of a content farm, they're making content available for _free_ without a terms of service in the hope that people visiting them won't be blocking the ads they're also serving. Show me the content farm that makes users agree to a terms of service requiring ad viewing, and then your examples make sense.
Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model.
Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armies of IT folks to actively work against you.
Maybe the business model is that you're serving ads in a non-centralized way, or maybe you're serving centralized ads to people with locked-down computers, but good luck serving blockable ads and relying on the good graces of the population to unblock your ads out of charity.