
VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks - archon810
https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/7jMWV7oCQpn
======
cantlin
At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn't rely on a
third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial
independence was important.

We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who
were there at the time still have nightmares about it.

We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-
browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad
provider. "It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!"

Oops. We'd naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full
responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap
between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went
and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.

The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of
vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes
made by an industry.

I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking
at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of
intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.

Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next
five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their
ad supply chain.

[0] [https://github.com/guardian/video-js-
vpaid](https://github.com/guardian/video-js-vpaid)

~~~
thirdsun
Thanks for your insight.

Maybe I'm naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody
wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively
receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?

~~~
dave_sullivan
Advertising is a weird business.

There's different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads).
Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now),
television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad
industry because that's where all your customers are and it's very trackable.

The value to the advertiser is either direct-action ("click here and
buuuuuy!") or branding ("we exist, see!") Companies like Verizon, Proctor and
Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, unilever, etc. spend billions on branding.

How does that money get allocated? Well, you've got a brand manager for, say,
Acme Inc. Their job is "Get more people to buy" and they split their resources
between creative--often working with big agencies (think Madmen, see
AdAge)--and media buying. There's often pressure to spend less on creative and
more on ad buys. And when ad buys don't perform, they say "We should have
spent more on creative".

Media buying is basically buying banner ads (or tv or whatever). They're
typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions), less often Cost Per
Click.

So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's a
bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work
for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent, they'll find
someone who will tell them it is.

~~~
manigandham
> So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it's
> a bunch of people's jobs to spend that money and convince the people they
> work for that it's money well spent. And if it's not money well spent,
> they'll find someone who will tell them it is.

I'll be the first to say there's a lot of mismanagement, incompetence,
politics, etc that leads to this but it's also one of the most data driven
industries around and there's a lot of proof behind the results. It's not all
just random guessing.

~~~
shostack
Despite all that data though, there's still very little in the way of a clear
approach to figuring out cross-channel attribution, valuing view-throughs etc.

~~~
manigandham
This is a case of it being simple but not easy.

The technical strategies are pretty straightforward but it's all the business
policies, silo'ed data, bad integrations/tech, privacy issues/constraints, and
(the worst of all) politics and outdated thinking, that cause these issues.

Attribution isn't that hard, it's basic analytics and statistical analysis -
but half the agencies don't have any understanding of math or tech and just
use last click wins with some unreliable vendor and probably poor
implementation which ultimately hurts everyone.

~~~
shostack
As someone who has invested countless hours reviewing attribution reports and
has seen how it is handled by companies of all sizes (including up to Fortune
50 brands), I respectfully disagree with your statement that "attribution
isn't that hard."

I have the fortune to also work with an incredibly bright Data Science team
(several of whom have phenomenal stats backgrounds), and they all agree with
me.

Many companies and agencies know last click has very real limitations.
Likewise, for anyone that has started to go down the rabbit hole, you quickly
find all of the other static models have similar limitations. Dynamic/data-
driven attribution at the user path level is the way forward, and Adobe's
econometric attribution modeling tools are the closest I've seen to getting it
right. But even that has limitations (cost being just one of them). The free
reports in GA and AdWords are a great start, but likewise have their own
issues.

There are a LOT of variables in terms of sample sizes, data accuracy,
inability to effectively isolate an experiment group due to other marketing
efforts, etc. that all throw other major wrenches into this.

All of that said, I'd genuinely love to hear your solution for how to
definitively solve attribution from an analytics and statistical analysis
perspective. As much as I disagree with your statement, I realize I don't have
all the answers, and if you have them, I (and many others) want to hear them.

Personally, I think this is the biggest challenge the industry faces right
now. My gut says display and video CPMs are overvalued, but better analytics
and better data are needed to really help advertisers answer the questions of
things like "what is a view through worth?" or "how much revenue should I
attribute to this display/video campaign?"

------
JoshTriplett
> A single VPAID ad absolutely demolishes site performance on mobile and
> desktop, and we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers.

The site is responsible for including ads; "publishers" should get the full
blame from their readers. The publishers themselves can complain to the ad
network they use, but readers are right to just blame the publishers.

~~~
mpclark
It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each
other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a
publisher to work out who they are dealing with.

The only network ads I had running on my news site were from Google Adsense,
the seemingly reputable choice, but I found ads and trackers from all sorts of
networks were infiltrating through that little window.

The only reasonable action was to just turn it all off and forgo the marginal
ad revenue. We now only host ads we have sold direct.

~~~
Sir_Substance
>It's not that straightforward though; these networks all pile in on each
other, layers and layers deep, and in real time. It is very difficult for a
publisher to work out who they are dealing with.

Then the publisher should stop working with networks that do this.

That's not in our control as users, only the publisher can do that.

~~~
archon810
The problem is pretty much all networks do this.

~~~
nailer
Maybe there's a market there? An ad network content providers can trust.

Even well known news websites have ios app store redirects that stop content
from being viewed.

~~~
dhimes
Maybe what we need isn't an ad network, but a service that makes it easy for
sites to self-host ads. Like some sort of gateway- I'm thinking adapter
pattern- so that advertisers build their ads to a certain spec, and the web
site plugs them in. The ad isn't served by a third party, just spec'd by it.
We'd also need a plug-and-play payment pattern.

~~~
marcosdumay
That gateway is an ad network.

Now, if it was an open standard without a gateway, it would be a different
beast. But fraud would kill it.

~~~
dhimes
No- the ad isn't served by the gateway. It's not an ad network. It's a
standard (open or not) combined with the _service_ to help advertisers conform
and site owners to plug them in. Like itunes for ads.

Ad networks seem to be immune to fraud. Large companies will pay to have their
brands seen anyway; us small guys take the hit.

~~~
dsl
Having worked for an ad network that went under due to fraud, I politely
disagree that they are immune.

~~~
dhimes
Interesting. Is the story online? Do you want to share?

~~~
dsl
Sales people sign up publishers, I make the determination they are fraudulent,
VP of Sales overrides my decisions, I leave company, advertisers demand
refunds of dollars already paid out to publishers, rinse, repeat.

~~~
dhimes
Hmmm. ok. Service trumps network then, for sure.

------
spiderfarmer
What I would like in a new kind of Ad network:

\- all ads are responsive HTML5 ads

\- all resources are loaded over HTTPS

\- ads are based on your content, not on a profile of the user

\- ads can be requested server side by sending the URL where the ad will be
displayed through an API. The response contains the ad code, as well as the
expiration date

\- if you want, you can even download a package with all resources so ad
blockers can't block you. (unless they target you specifically)

\- if you don't get an ad in return, you can fill that space with your own
fallback ads

\- the ad network also does some kind of sentiment analysis so it doesn't show
ads for Donald Trump on a page that's critical about him

\- the ad network immediately severs ties with anyone who abuses the system

~~~
_ao789
This is literally what HaloAds (HaloAds.com) aims to fix. We have been
irritated with the state of online advertising for long enough now.

We are looking for people to try it out once it launches. Show your interest
at [https://HaloAds.com](https://HaloAds.com)

~~~
nailer
Since you seem to specialise in this, FYI:

> Mixed Content: The page at '[https://haloads.com/'](https://haloads.com/')
> was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure stylesheet
> '[http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:400,300,700,900'](http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:400,300,700,900').
> This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.
> [https://haloads.com/assets/img/favicon.png](https://haloads.com/assets/img/favicon.png)
> Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 ()

~~~
WiseWeasel
For Google Fonts, it's best practice to leave out the protocol and link to
'//fonts.googleapis.com/...'. It's unhelpful that their link generator still
suggests '[http://fonts...'](http://fonts...').

~~~
spiderfarmer
Or just download them and serve them from your own domain. If you enable
HTTP/2 there is little to no advantage of using a third party for hosting
fonts.

~~~
bowersbros
Wont they be cached from other peoples websites saving the download?

~~~
spiderfarmer
No. Well, maybe, if you're using one of the most popular fonts, but each
combination of weights is a seperate CSS file, that's probably a unique
combination and _only cached for 24 hours_. A reason _not_ to use Google fonts
is that it's just another tracking tool in their arsenal. For each request,
cookies are sent to Google's servers, so they have enough reason to avoid
cache hits.

------
a3n
From the comments:

> Peter Dahlberg > we, the publishers, get the full blame from our readers.
> That's because you are to blame. As far as I know nobdoy forces you to use
> those shitty ad networks. Look for a honest way to finance your business and
> don't whine.﻿

That actually makes a lot of sense. As long as Google et al. are making money
from this, they have no incentive to change. Google, the automated rainbow
monolith, in particular doesn't have any incentive to even _listen_.

But if publishers take the apparently extremely inconvenient step of using
other networks, this sort of shit might get cleaned up. EDIT: Perhaps I should
have said "other buyers;" these problems seem closely associated with the
nature of ad networks.

The problem for me as a user, is how would I know the difference that such a
site has, and then know that I can whitelist it?

~~~
volatilitish
One of the problems there, is Google has locked this down.

Chrome and Firefox warn users if they visit "deceptive websites", and disallow
it. It's touted as part of their "safe browsing feature".

What it means in practice though, is that if you use another ad network, and
that ad network has an advert that Google dislike, they will block your
website on Chrome,Firefox and Safari also uses it now I believe. They won't
just block the advert, they will block your whole website. Getting unblocked
takes ages, and is a complete pain, because google will not tell you which
advert it objects to.

So it's not a simple case of "Use other networks", because Google have thought
about that, and locked it down. It's a big risk to use another ad network,
because Google might just decide to block your website.

The fact that Google now controls what websites users are allowed to visit,
should ring alarm bells with everyone. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be
reported on.

~~~
mercer
> What it means in practice though, is that if you use another ad network, and
> that ad network has an advert that Google dislike, they will block your
> website on Chrome,Firefox and Safari also uses it now I believe. They won't
> just block the advert, they will block your whole website. Getting unblocked
> takes ages, and is a complete pain, because google will not tell you which
> advert it objects to.

Does this actually happen? And if so, what about the advert does Google
dislike? And if there is no good reason for this, how does Google get away
with it?

~~~
Tyr42
It's usually a legitimately harmful ad. Malware, adware or other bad stuff.
But these slip through quality control of ad networks, even when they don't
want them.

~~~
volatilitish
It's worse than that IMHO.

They dislike "deceptive" adverts. So for example, if it's an image, saying
"download" then Google will block your website.

Who knows, maybe in the future they'll start banning websites that advertise
gambling or other things they dislike.

Now I do think that adverts like that are irritating, and deceptive, but
should the _website_ that happens to be using an ad-network, that allowed an
advertiser to upload an image that says "download", be blocked so that users
cannot access it from Chrome and firefox? Of course not. Censorship in
browsers is just not a good thing going forward. And pretty much every ad-
network (Even adsense) has problems keeping out bad adverts. I don't see why
Google should penalise website owners for an advertising-industry-wide
problem.

IMHO It should be investigated by governments, as it's a clear case of using
their muscle to retain their absolute monopoly of online advertising.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Now I do think that adverts like that are irritating, and deceptive, but
> should the website that happens to be using an ad-network, that allowed an
> advertiser to upload an image that says "download", be blocked so that users
> cannot access it from Chrome and firefox? Of course not.

Why not? At least that would get websites to look at the ads their ad networks
are serving up a little more than "not at all". Ultimately these ads would
impact the site's brand even if browsers didn't block it, the damage would
just be more subtle and easier to ignore.

Until somebody in the ad delivery chain accepts responsibility for ad quality
nothing is going to change. Publishers and websites have the most to lose here
and should be demanding better from their ad networks.

~~~
volatilitish
So you want to squash the tiny amount of competition there is in the online
advertising space?

I think it would be fantastic to have a credible alternative to Google
adsense, but there isn't one at the moment.

Technically, a better approach would be for Google to block the advertisement
or even the ad network. Blocking the website publisher is just bullying
tactics.

------
captainmuon
I'm a bit shocked about the state of advertising. When I was making websites
(~early 2000s), there were a lot more options to choose from, it seems. Now
you basically just have Google and this opaque network of algorithmic
auctions. Back then, you had a bunch of small business ad networks that you
could choose from.

I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video
(thank God), but you could have unobtrusive text links, you could have
banners, little buttons, HTML blocks, and so on. And yes, also annoying pop-
ups and flash ads...

You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today, but I
believe it was not nearly as bad as we think. It was certainly better than
some alternatives (horrible pop-up-ads that installed dialers, does anybody
remember them?) Back then, I was proud to not serve evil or annoying ads, and
to promote articles from partners on my site - including setting links to them
to promote their page ranks. (That Google shows links among search results
that they get money for, but forbids slightly improving the position of search
results when other people got money for it tells a lot IMHO.)

One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own
ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big
sites?

~~~
pjc50
_One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their
own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn 't done at least from
big sites?_

There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real
humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of
javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud
the advertiser.

~~~
a3n
How do physical newspapers prove ad serving to their buyers? I'm certain they
don't point to every single newspaper thrown in a driveway.

~~~
pjc50
Third parties and surveys e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Counc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Council)

Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.

~~~
kbart
So why can't the same be done on websites? If numbers of views can't be
confirmed without spying on users or trusting shady actors to do that for you,
it means the business model that is based on this metric is skewed.

~~~
lmm
If one network offers approximate numbers from an expensive external audit and
another network offers "exact" tracking through cookies etc., which network do
you think advertisers will spend with?

~~~
kbart
Exactly such egoistic and short term thinking led us to the current situation
and the widespread usage of ad-blockers, no?

------
_Understated_
In most walks of life we happily pay for something that provides us value:
Cars, phones, shoes etc. I don't see the web/app ecosystem as any different
although owners (that's app creators and web site owners/creators) feel they
can make more by selling our lives to a third party - That's not something I
want to happen with my details I will block your system for doing so. If I
feel your site/app is not providing me with value then I likely will
uninstall/never come back. It's a choice thing.

I have paid for apps in the past and will continue to do so in the future but
only for stuff that brings me real value. I may not be the biggest supporter
out there but I have a couple of Patreon's running (is that the right term?)
for people that provide me with value.

Let's face it, there is a whole load of shite content out there... so maybe we
need to cull the herd a bit.

Anyway, you can run a website for almost nothing these days and spending, say,
$50 a month will get you some serious hosting solutions so if your business is
just exploiting my browsing habits and selling my metadata on then I will
happily grab the popcorn and watch your site burn.

~~~
a3n
I pay for access to NYT, Economist and Guardian. And I still block their ads.
I expect them to eventually kick me out or charge more, because I'm sure my
subscription fee isn't covering their profit goals.

Even if I was paying full fee for these things to be dropped on my physical
door step every day, there would still be ads, only they'd be static and safe.

~~~
lsaferite
I have a visceral hate for advertising inside a product I pay money for
(website, magazine, movie, etc). The only exception I've found to that being a
product packaging including advertising for additional catalog items from the
same manufacturer or retailer.

------
ungzd
BTW, nowadays everyone talks about AI, machine learning and "mobile-first".
But when I open any mobile app or any mobile website with ads I see only ads
of "clash of kings" and similar scammy games. They collect lots of data but
ads have no targeting at all. At least ads on mobile phones. I can't
understand it.

~~~
rm999
I used to work in the industry - mobile ads can be quite targeted. My guess is
apps like clash of clans appeal to a wide range of people and are backed by
heavy ad spending. This means a wide variety of people will be targeted with
their ads.

Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer probably
isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers, or ads for
retirement communities.

~~~
creshal
> Doesn't mean ads arent targeted. E.g. a 25 year old white programmer
> probably isn't getting Spanish language ads, or ads targeting new mothers,
> or ads for retirement communities.

You'd be surprised. I bought a travel sewing kit five years ago on Amazon, and
ever since I'm getting advertisements and "recommendations" for handbags,
makeup and high-heeled shoes. It's so blatantly sexist and wrong it's almost
funny again.

Almost.

~~~
wtbob
> It's so blatantly sexist and wrong it's almost funny again.

Have you considered that it's blatantly sexist and _right_? I.e., that perhaps
no-one programmed the ad network to associate sewing kits with handbags,
makeup & high-heeled shoes, that perhaps the ad serving AIs learnt that on
their own?

I wonder what we'll do when our AIs come to socially-unacceptable-but-true
conclusions. Humans can be brow-beaten or persuaded into ignoring the truth
systematically, but computers have to either have each bit of truth-denying
programmed into them, or have much better intelligence and spend much more CPU
calculating at a higher level in order to avoid socially-unacceptable truths.

~~~
creshal
> Have you considered that it's blatantly sexist and right?

I buy an average of a hundred items on Amazon a year, among them all my – male
– clothes. Your algorithms are just plain shit when a single purchase five
years ago is somehow weighed more than the whole rest.

~~~
apk17
The algorithm guesses that your wife is doing the ordering, and is targeting
her.

~~~
creshal
So the algorithm isn't even able to differentiate between the buying behaviour
of a married couple and a single male living alone, with roughly 10 years
worth of buying history to judge from?

I'd fire the department responsible for that waste of money.

------
jacquesm
At some point the cost of advertising to the medium in terms of user
disengagement will exceed the income. I can't wait for it to happen, then at
least we will reach some kind of steady-state.

I really pity the newspapers, especially the ones that also have an online
presence, they are caught between a rock and a hard place and no matter what
they do they end up hurting themselves, their employers, users or
shareholders. It's very hard to transition from a 1800's model to one that
will work 200 years later.

Bandwidth being as cheap as it is means that advertisers really don't care
about how many bytes they need to shove down the pipe in order to make a sale.
End users on metered bandwidth (mobile for instance) will suffer but that's
not the advertisers problem, to them it is mission accomplished and the
website owner/publisher will end up holding the bag.

~~~
archon810
I find it pretty ironic that Google constantly tries to optimize for every
byte in some of its products, pushes for speed and mobile optimization, yet
ends up completely negating that in its advertising offerings.

This and the malware that gets through. Stop allowing arbitrary Javascript in
ads, and that's it - problem solved. But nope, the cat and mouse chase goes
on, and maldvertisers are always a step ahead.

------
adam-a
I recently had a similar problem, browsing a reputable news site
(newstatesman.com), I accidentally clicked an ad and got taken directly to a
page containing explicit pornography. I complained to the site and they said
they do what they can in terms of blacklisting ads, but they don't have enough
time or staff.

I can't believe there's no ad network that will take a stand against abusive
advertising and actually vet the ads on their network. Surely they could get a
lot of business and at least a lot of goodwill. Is it just too labour
intensive?

~~~
moron4hire
You would think some of the most profitable companies in the world could
afford to hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go
out.

~~~
poooogles
>hire a few interns to put eyes on any and all ads before they go out.

They do, all creatives are audited on submission. You can't provide literally
ANY creative at bid time, it has to be one that's been audited. It's people
that then switch the creative once the audit has been completed that are
screwing everyone. It should result in you being banned from the network, but
it's hard (apparently) to ban people that are paying the bills for you the ad
network.

~~~
mikeash
Why is it even possible to make changes after the audit?

~~~
aembleton
Because the user is forwarded to a website that can be changed.

~~~
mikeash
Oh right, I momentarily forgot that the complaint here was with the target of
the ad, not the ad itself.

------
snarfy
Sites need to be legally liable for installing malware on your computer. That
will solve all of this. I can go to prison for clicking on the wrong link but
somehow they get away with drive-by ransomware installs.

~~~
archon810
This is laughable. If site owners could go to jail every time a 3rd-party code
they're not fully responsible for does something bad, they'd all be in jail
now.

[https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-
analysis/2015/08/large-...](https://blog.malwarebytes.org/threat-
analysis/2015/08/large-malvertising-campaign-takes-on-yahoo/)

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-
hit-b...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-
of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/)

Etc.

~~~
franciscop
Then the only standing ones would be site owners who care enough to make sure
they don't allow malware on their visitor from their site. What's the problem?

~~~
archon810
Because that's not how the world works. You'd jail 99.999% of publishers and
the only ones not jailed would be ones who don't have any advertising.

~~~
J_Darnley
Sounds great to me. People only publishing what they want others to read, no
clickbait, absolutely marvellous.

~~~
umanwizard
How do you expect journalists to pay their rent in this utopia?

~~~
franciscop
The internet and cheap computing has made anyone with some writing skills able
to compete with journalists.

So maybe journalism as a profession is dying as blogging as a hobby rises. Of
course there is value in professional journalism, but the need for that
journalism is more specific.

IMO it will happen similar to encyclopedia authors or GPS makers followed a
decade back.

------
arca_vorago
What ever happened to just offering a product that is in high demand and
charging for it, and ignoring advertisers?

There are a lot more cancers of the advertising industry than just those
listed too. In particular I would say the news industry which is a shadow of
its former self, is a great example. It doesnt matter what major news site I
go to, theres a big half, full, middle page popup that requires an x yo be
hit, or wait for this ad, or some wierd hyperlink hijacking bullshit, or any
number of other douchebaggery which tells me the site considers the ad network
a bigger customer than the reader.

I'm mostly talking about on the phone, on desktop, with a combination of
ublock origin and others this is greatly reduced, but only a small subset of
the population uses those.

Our country is in what amounts to a constitutional democratic crisis of epic
proportions but ads are interfering with citizens informing themselves due to
recursive feedback loops between publishers and advertisers.

Dont even get me started on how the standard SV business model I see is:
create something semi novel, get a bunch of users, sell company, new owners
exploit users for advertising, ride the wave until the crash.

Or how people pay money for cable but still sit through 18 minutes of
brainwashing, mindnumbing commercials for the priviledge of paying!

Its a big ol racket basket of bullshit. Cancer barely even begins to describe
it. How about stage 4 metasticised cancer of the everything.

------
franciscop
If someone needs to have an ad solution to have their website running it is
NOT a business that should exist.

It's like we say restaurant owners should support the mafia because otherwise
they cannot make money in the neighborhood. Or any other criminal(ish)
activity.

"Without advertising we wouldn't be able to run this" MAYBE it really means
you shouldn't run it at all, but don't force advertising(+malware) down your
users throat just to justify an unsound business decision.

Edit: reworded to avoid confussion

~~~
anexprogrammer
But a lot of niche forums - games, hobbies and so forth are unlikely to
monetise any other way. Should they die too? Or have to rely on a rich
benefactor deciding to host a motorcycling (or whatever) site?

Few are going to pay a subscription to chat on a Civilization or fishing forum
a few hours a week. Advertising _should_ be the appropriate model for this.
Trouble is it's being poisoned by the greed of Buzzfeed and Wired etc.

~~~
Faaak
Come on, hosting a simple website/forum is really cheap nowadays. Some
websites (wikipedia being the main one) simply ask for donations at the end of
the year.

~~~
angry-hacker
Wikipedia is in different position than other sites.

Every time someone posts a link to paywall, everyone discusses how to bypass
it. And the people reading HN are wealthy Silicon Valley people. Well, not me
but you get the idea.

Everyone talking about charging people instead ads - have you ever tried it?
Tell me your success stories.

~~~
icebraining
My forum runs on yearly donations. The shared hosting plan and domain cost
$48/y, so about six people usually cover the costs for the whole year for the
price of a fast-food lunch.

If you're trying to pay salaries, good luck, but hosting costs are very low
nowadays.

------
bkmartin
Yep... I have seen this increasing steadily for a while now. Most major "news"
sites have this garbage being served. Then these same sites decide to autoload
video at the top of the page and their site becomes completely unusable. Do
they not realize how horrible the experience is for the user?

~~~
omerhj
It took CNN years to get the aspect ratio of their videos right -- all of
their web video used to look like standard def TV stretched out to a HD
screen. So the answer is almost certainly no.

------
Faint
This whole thing would actually be technically quite easy to solve: just
introduce new attribute to iframe, say f.ex. you could have traffic-
limit="10MB", and request-limit="5". Browser would block the iframe and
anything that runs in it cold, if it exceeds limits. In an ad-auction one
would sell the ad space with the knowledge of those limits. Publisher would
have perfect control on how heavy ads they allow on their page. Ad networks
could still run arbitrary js. And tracking the amount of raw traffic or
requests on a separate iframe should not be hard to implement.

~~~
ojosilva
Wouldn't it be easy to just...

    
    
         var iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
         iframe.src = '(ad url here)';
         document.body.appendChild(iframe);
    

For every new ad?

~~~
Dylan16807
Sure, and since that code runs inside the frame because you're not crazy
enough to let it out of its box, the new nested frame shares the same budget.
No problem.

------
BooneJS
Some people, like my elderly father, live in an area where it's dial-up or
Verizon LTE MiFi with severe data caps (~14 GB for $100 per month). He's an
old-school newspaper & magazine reader, so advertisements don't offend him. He
actually looks at them from time to time as he reads ESPN and on-line
newspapers.

However, page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in
his pocket to purchase the products and services being advertised. Something
needs to give.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_page loads that approach 100 MB are leaving him with less money in his
pocket_

Install Firefox and NoScript for him. Turn off Javascript completely,
everywhere, except on a handful of whitelisted sites.

That's what I use, every day, and it's really no problem to surf the Web that
way. You miss some of the pictures, you miss 99% of the ads, you're not
constantly wallowing in the advertising cesspool.

------
alistproducer2
This is exactly why I have JavaScript turned off on mobile and selectively for
some desktop site (politico nd salon are two examples of ba actors).

As a die hard JavaScript guy, I hate doing this. The performance gains have
been so large that I dont miss JavaScript any more. There are a few sites that
demand it and I make the determination whether or not to enable JavaScript
based on how badly I want to read or do whatever is at that site.

------
sunstone
On my desktop the fan literally starts winding up for takeoff when I hit one
of these pages. Taken across all the users how much electricity is just being
wasted by these things?

Perhaps there should be a running "hall of shame" listing of the most
egregious offending pages. Sure it's not their fault directly but these days
few organizations want to be associated with the useless wasting of energy.

------
lpgauth
This as nothing to do with VPAID[1], it's the player that decides how many ads
to play. VPAID is just an IAB standard for video ads...

[1] [http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-
interf...](http://www.iab.com/guidelines/digital-video-player-ad-interface-
definition-vpaid-2-0/)

~~~
phamilton
That's mostly true. The player decides how long to allow the ads to play. It's
very possible to put multiple ads in a single VPAID unit.

~~~
lpgauth
Sure, but the player will decide how many ads to play.

~~~
phamilton
That's my point. The player will decide how many VPAID units to play. The
VPAID unit can show multiple ads and essentially lie to the player saying it's
a single ad. This happens, and is actually on the mild end of abuse.

------
whatever_dude
And people complained about Flash, as if it was the cause. It was just one of
the effects.

We moved on, and now it's even worse because now it's one additional http hit
for every resource requested (images, jsons, etc). Things were as bad before
with tags and tracking and analytics and whatnot, but at least many of the
resources loaded were self-contained in a well compressed SWF file.

Hopefully now we're realizing it's not about the technology involved, but what
people actually do with it.

------
timdorr
How is something like this even economical?

All those servers to keep up with that request rate and all that bandwidth
spent. Even as costs go down, I don't see how anyone can break even on this.
The tiny fraction of a penny earned on this ad is surely outweighed by the
cost to display it.

And also the follow-on costs of increasing bounce rates and less time-on-site.
Publishers have to be seeing less value in these kinds of ads that perform
this way.

It doesn't make any kind of economical sense!

------
tengkahwee
Unfortunately ad technology and creative companies are not using the VPAID
standard properly. Essentially VPAID is simply a JS file. One really bad VPAID
I seen is generated through Adobe Animate CC and meshed with a bunch of custom
code with jQuery in it. The image assets are all oversized because Samsung
Galaxy S6 edge supports 2560 x 1440 and it wasn't resized to fit desktop
proportions. The VPAID standard doesn't constrain the designer in terms of
payload and how many connections to send.

------
Narutu
Has anyone tweeted this to Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) ?

~~~
archon810
Good idea.
[https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568](https://twitter.com/ArtemR/status/742687018514157568)

~~~
poooogles
>I'm the head of the webspam team at Google. (Currently on leave).

From his Twitter account.

------
gregatragenet3
I can see why advertising networks want to use ads which slow down browsers.
The only ads I've 'clicked on' lately are those where the site was loading
slowly and the bowser registered my click late, on an ad window which changed
page layout as it loaded. I think most clickthroughs these days are from the
page layout jumping around while rendering and not real. If the page rendered
quickly you'd loose all these accidental clicks.

------
rubyfan
This among many other reasons is why publishers lose the ad blocker debate
with me.

------
bernarpa
I manage ads in several mobile apps and I've chosen to disable full screen
video ads. Still Google's AdMob mail hints keep recommending to activate them
as well in order to get more revenue. More revenue for me and more revenue for
the ad provider, that's the only reason.

~~~
archon810
I'm on a war path with these video ads, but advertising networks don't give us
enough (or any) tools to disable serving them. Most of the time, it's either
all or nothing. Some let you disable certain types of ads, including AdSense
(it has a VPAID checkbox now that I think about it), but when I reached out to
AdX people about it, they were not helpful so far (their recommendation was to
turn off anything that says "video" in the OptIn tab, except that does not get
rid of these VPAID ads).

sovrn was a network I dropped for this very reason - they kept serving VPAID
ads and didn't give me a way to turn them off.

The list goes on.

------
jkot
> _I 'm at 53MB downloaded and 5559 requests._

That was not advertisement, but malware. It is probably running DDos attack on
some website. We should block that.

Anyway, at ancient days I surfed with i486 on 14.4 kbps modem. Not much has
changed since.

~~~
mrweasel
>That was not advertisement, but malware.

I doubt it. It more likely that someone wants to know how long the
reader/users of a page are exposed to their ads. Some idiot savant then
figured "Hey, we'll play a video and download the bits in chucks. Then we know
how much of the videos was played, and that's the amount of time they spend on
the page."

~~~
jarnix
It's just that the advertiser, the agency, the ad network, another ad network,
and another agency are tracking the time that you are watching the video.
Plus, sometimes, they track every second or the code is really dirty and does
this kind of crazy number of http (tracking) requests. 5000 requests is above
the average though :) But I saw recently an ad like that, and it was like 100%
of my surf on a website.

------
forrestthewoods
Block all ads, all the time. No exception.

It's not an ad blocker. It's malware protection.

------
tlrobinson
One of the ad blocker blockers I came across had the balls to suggest blocking
ads could negatively affect the performance of the site.

I laughed, then dropped into the DOM inspector to remove the blocker overlay
element.

~~~
ojii
Probably bloomberg? They have this hilarious ad-blocker blocker popup:

    
    
      We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, 
      which may adversely affect the performance 
      and content on Bloomberg.com. For the 
      best experience, please whitelist the site.
    

No bloomberg, the ad-blocker positively affects the performance and content on
your site. For the best experience, make sure your adblocker blacklist is up
to date.

------
kerkeslager
What it comes down to for me is this: businesses don't have some god-given
right to exist. If you can't get people to give money to your business enough
to at least cover your costs, then your business should go out of business.

If we enter into a business relationship, I will pay you for a good or service
that you want. I will be obligated to do so because we came to an agreement in
which you provide me the good or service and I give you money. But I'm not
obligated to pay you money if I don't want to, and in turn, you wouldn't be
obligated to provide me with your good or service. If not enough people give
you money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you take with running
a business.

If you enter into a business relationship with an advertiser, good luck. That
has nothing to do with me. I get that you came to an agreement with the
advertiser in which you provide them with ad viewers and they give you money,
but it's not my responsibility to help you hold up your end of the bargain by
viewing ads. At best advertisers are wasting my attention to try to sell me
something I don't want or need. At worst, they're lying to me, collecting my
private data, installing malware on my devices. Advertising is almost
universally reprehensible. I want nothing to do with them. If advertisers
don't pay you enough money, you will go out of business. That's the risk you
take with running a business.

Of course, if I don't view your ads, you aren't obligated to provide me with
your good or service. I fully support sites that use anti-adblocking banners.
I mean I support them morally, not financially; if I come across such a banner
I'll leave.

There are arguments about whose responsibility it is when ads do reprehensible
things: is it the ad network or the publisher? This strikes me as similar to
arguing whether the hit man or the person who hired him is responsible. Don't
take money to do reprehensible things and you won't have this problem.

There's also an argument floating around that ads are the only things that
makes quality content possible. This is obviously false: I remember the 90s
and content was _better_ pre-advertising. Sheldon Brown's website[1] is
_still_ the best website if you want to choose a bike that fits your needs.
Erowid[2] is _still_ the best resource for information on drug harm reduction.
And decades of development have only made things better for non-ad models:
even without a packaged solution like Patreon it's not hard to include
donations or paid subscriptions on your website.

Yes, some businesses will not survive the transition to non-ad models, but we
have good reason to believe that the BuzzFeeds and Gawkers of the world will
be disproportionately represented in that number. I'm looking forward to it.

[1] [http://sheldonbrown.com/](http://sheldonbrown.com/)

[2] [https://www.erowid.org/](https://www.erowid.org/)

~~~
kup0
Thank you for this comment. I have never been able to really articulate my
position well on web advertising (even to myself, when debating over the sides
of the issue) and this is it.

------
pmcgrathm
It isn't the ad itself that is causing those streams of requests, but rather
the ad technology vendors buying or selling the data from the ad server from
which the ad was delivered.

Don't blame the publisher or advertiser for not noticing that their 'anti-
fraud' vendor is sending itself events every millisecond.

------
natch
OK, so this guy is complaining about a cancer inflicted on us by advertisers
like Google, while posting on a site that (speaking of cancers nobody is
talking about) requires a Google login to view. I agree with his point, but
the obliviousness to the problem caused by his choice of blogging platform is
a bit rich.

~~~
brohee
Doesn't require a Google login for me...

~~~
natch
You're probably already logged in.

------
kazinator
The fact that video objects can be started programmatically is the problem.
There should be no API for a page to start a video; it should be only possible
for a video to start via a UI action.

It's not just a problem with ads, but with videos in general. If I land in a
video-hosting site, I don't want the video to start.

~~~
mjevans
I agree that playing, fullscreening, etc, a video should be a /protected/
action. However I believe that an end user should have SOME mechanism of
allowing such actions on their behalf.

If this sounds like a security model you are correct.

Currently the lowest hanging fruit security model would be allowing a plugin
to run client side and white-listing which domains it can work with (is
triggered/loaded on).

------
spiderfarmer
Why isn't there an ad network that lets you inject ads server side? That would
solve a lot of problems.

~~~
archon810
Because any sort of page caching makes it much harder to count impressions,
among other reasons.

~~~
spiderfarmer
With HTML5 ads there are several ways around that I think?

~~~
archon810
HTML is a client-side language for browsers to interpret. I'm not sure what
you mean exactly - can you please clarify?

~~~
spiderfarmer
HTML5 ads are like small webpages. So you can still use javascript to load
tracking pixels from within the creative.

[https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017](https://www.richmediagallery.com/detailPage?id=9017)

------
chrismbarr
One thing to note: When the developer tools are opened Chrome will temporarily
disable the cache. When the video loops it would normally just reach into
cache and re-play the file that was already downloaded. However, with devtools
open it will probably re-download all the files again.

~~~
archon810
That's not true at all. It only disables the cache if you tell it to. Like so:
[http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png](http://i.imgur.com/dutc1cy.png).

As you can see, that checkbox is not on in the demoed GIF.

The ad code is actively requesting new ads and pinging its trackers countless
times.

~~~
chrismbarr
ok, sure, it's configurable. But that box is checked by default.

~~~
archon810
1\. Not for any installs of Chrome I've ever had.

2\. That's entirely irrelevant in this matter because it was not turned on.

------
dave2000
I block ads so perhaps one of the many "we owe it to site owners to not block
ads" types can explain an alternative solution which doesn't involve me paying
for stuff I don't want and which both slows my devices and drains their
batteries.

~~~
dredmorbius
Universal content syndication / income-indexed broadband (or total content)
tax.

$100/year will cover all Internet ads.

$500/year will cover all advertising. Period.

That's money you're already paying.

Oh, and that's Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia, pretty much. The
rest of the world gets awesome content for no charge.

~~~
dave2000
I'm already paying that? I would never opt into advertising like that were it
available. Most of the sites on the internet can just die for all I care. I'd
still do online banking, buy stuff from amazon, read news on the BBC's sites.
I don't mind paying individual sites if they ever wake up and offer that
possibility but i'm not holding my breath. But as long as the choice is
"streaming video/running javascript/annoying popups/privacy violation" vs that
site going away, well...bye bye.

~~~
dredmorbius
Advertising has costs. They're paid by consumers.

My "you" is statistical, but yes, generally, of the $500 billion spent on ads
worldwide, the industrialised world, about 1 billion people, pay for it. If my
maths check out, that's $500/year.

Amazon is Google's largest single advertiser.

I'll see if I cant find an _excellent_ HN comment made a ways back (and not by
me).

Ah, here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773)

~~~
dave2000
Thank you for taking the trouble to find and post it, but I don't agree with
hardly any of it. Facebook is free and so even if it were true that it would
be of higher quality if there was a cost associated with it, i'm happy with it
the way it is. (The great is the enemy of the good and all that). I have a
very minimal use of facebook; just Messenger, and that's a great little app.
If my usage of Facebook is paying for the infrastructure (and for Whatsapp,
which I prefer because of the encryption) then so be it. I'm glad to be a part
of it; I don't feel used or violated at all. They're welcome to whatever data
they can clean from me; very little, I suspect. I don't see the ads, of
course, because I use ad-blockers. The arguments about the best minds making
people click on ads; well, at least the ads pay for services like google,
facebook etc. A lot of very smart people are creating games, or writing blogs,
or whatever. Utterly artless (most games are not art using any meaningful
definition of the word) distractions from life. But that's their choice, and
the consumers who use them. I'm not going to start paying for search engines
or facebook or email etc any time soon.

The bit about advertising and its effects on society at the end is the bit I
come closest to agreeing with, and it's a shame that the author of that past
thought to start it with a quote from a terrible book and not, say, Noam
Chomsky. I have no problem with advertising in principle; just the way it's
been co-opted to sell lies and dreams. Ads on the web - in contrast to the
sorts of ads you get offline - seem to be old fashioned, telling you about
specific products and services, rather than showing you what your life could
be like if only you owned this or that brand of fridge.

------
cwilkes
I'm more angry that clicking on this link on my iPhone even in Safari's
Private browser launches the Google Plus application.

Why not just go to the webpage? And why launch another app that can identify
me from an app that is meant to not allow that?

------
ademarre
Why is the online advertising industry so slow to address performance
problems? Doing so is clearly in their best interest. Don't give people a
reason to hate your product, especially when it's in your power to make it
better.

------
grandalf
For some reason I ignore ads when I'm reading content. Nonetheless, once sites
started moving to full interruption ads, I decided to use adblock.

What boggles my mind is that people actually look at the ads and click on them
and buy things.

~~~
umanwizard
People don't have to click on ads for them to be useful. You can't click on a
billboard.

------
jakeogh
Anyone looking for a DNS level blocking solution, please checkout
[https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate](https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate)

------
mrdrozdov
Publishers can blacklist ads, so unless they have tried to do so and failed
then this is a way to shift blame from themselves on to a system that has been
helping them all along.

------
some1else
We have a real duty to maintain engineering excellence, before all our tech is
spaghetti. What happens once the MegaBytes don't count anymore?

------
faebi
At least now I know why my old iPad 2 becomes unusable on certain websites.
Life without an adblocker is really not nice.

------
mtgx
Is this really such a hard problem for Google to solve or is it just turning a
blind eye to it?

Can't Google limit the size of the ads somehow? The number of requests per
page? Whether the ad remains a static image or it's a video? I find it hard to
believe it would be that hard for Google to implement restrictions around
this.

And advertisers wonder why the use of adblockers is skyrocketing. If Google
knows about this but isn't willing to fix it, then I worry it will allow
similar stuff to work within AMP pages as well, but the difference will be you
won't be able to block them unless you block the whole content as well. That
would mean advertisers have learned nothing from the rise of adblockers.

~~~
marcosdumay
Increasing Google's revenue every quarter is certainly enough of a challenge
without a policy of discarding clients.

Don't expect any solution from them. This is something end users (by ad-
blocking) or startups (by destroying the market) can do, but not big
companies.

------
wcummings
I can only speak as an implementer: fuck VPAID

------
Dunofrey
I still won't use ad blockers, I find them akin to stealing from content
creators, but I'm getting close.

~~~
krylon
After several incidents where malware was distributed through ads, I think it
is fair to call it self defence.

~~~
blahi
This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale. The
lion's share of malware distribution is done by hacked sites where the
attacker configured to deliver a payload only in 5-10% of pageviews in order
to delay detection.

~~~
kbart
_This is a valid argument only for people who disable javascript wholesale "_

Not only. My older relatives happily click on "Congratulations, you won a
million!!!" ads and end up with yet another browser bar or worse. No
JavaScript required.

~~~
blahi
Parent talks about distribution of malware...

