Ask HN: Why don't publishers serve ads from their domains to thwart ad-blockers? - akc
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ConSeannery
Here's how a typical banner/adspace currently works:

1\. The ad/banner space downloads a javascript file

2\. Javascript runs, collects browser+cookie+other identifying information and
sends it on up to an ad exchange

3\. The ad-exchange systems cross-reference the information it receives with
other information it already has (think huge low latency k/v store) in order
to try to identify you further, perform cross-device identification, save more
information

4\. The ad-exchange system then rolls all this information together and fans
out this package saying "here is a male aged 25-35 who likes ponies and bick
shaving cream" to dozens or hundreds of partnered ad providers

5\. Each ad provider looks at their content, finds a close match, and then
bids on how much they would pay in order to serve content to this person

6\. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder (no
idea why it's the second highest)

7\. Ad-exchange then sends this second highest bidder's ad URL back to the
waiting javascript running in the users browser, and ad-exchange marks the
winning bid so it knows who won/who has to pay at the end of the month.

8\. From 1 to here usually has an SLA of occurring in less than 170ms

9\. User's browser then loads up the response URL and the ad displays

Asking website operators to host their own thing is feasible, but perhaps not
worthwhile. The big money maker in adspace is targeted advertising, and small
sites will never have the infrastructure to be able to really identify anybody
but perhaps their core users. Others have mentioned reverse proxies to make
content appear as if it came from the target site, and that may exist, but the
reality is whatever these guys do is currently being defeated pretty handily
by community driven ad blocking. Perhaps we will eventually see what you're
talking about though

~~~
ahp
> 6\. Ad-exchange receives all the bids and picks the second highest bidder
> (no idea why it's the second highest)

It's called a Vickrey Auction. It allows bidders to bid their true value
(instead of trying to outbid all of the other bidders, as is what results from
a first-price auction).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction)

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austenallred
Generally ads pay up to an order of magnitude more if there is some level of
tracking and targeting available, and that's what most ad blockers target.
Paying a bunch of money to show ads to who-knows-who who-knows-how-many-times
isn't very valuable. Paying money to show ads to owners of Shitzus that make
over $100,000/year is worth $12/click.

I'm pretty certain that as ad blockers grow there will be a lot more work-
around (doing the work on the backend and serving up static HTML or a lot more
native ads), but ad blockers aren't _quite_ to the level that it's worth it to
make those changes.

~~~
mgalka
Is there that much of a difference? Publishers should have a pretty good
breakdown of their visitors demographic distribution.

~~~
austenallred
It depends on the publication. If you're ESPN you have a _pretty good_ idea
(which, by the way, makes the publication as a whole more valuable)

If you're Yahoo, however, it's pretty much a toss up.

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0x0
I guess one of the "benefits" of serving ads from a third party site is that
you can cookie the user on the thirdparty domain, and build a profile as the
user moves between participant sites. ("Re-targeting"). Serving ads from a
first party domain likely loses this information since there won't be a shared
cookie? Also it might complicate installation (you'd need to install some
server side software that fetches ad content from the ad network, and probably
some custom development to integrate it without being caught by a one-line
rule in adblock?)

Also! With more and more ads running javascript based animations, you really
don't want shady ad-network-provided JS running in the context of your main
site. (XSS)

~~~
chinathrow
Can't you set a cookie then re-direct to the PNG/JPG back on your own server?

Aynway, I've seen some domains shifting some crucial images like a play button
into ad containers/folders just to come around ad blocker. Easy to adjust
within ad blockers though.

~~~
0x0
Not sure what you mean; if you mean to point an <img src> at a third party
domain that responds with a 301 redirect together with a Set-Cookie then that
won't really work because 1. you are pointing to a third party domain which
the OP already suggested is blocked so the client never loads it and 2. you
would need a complicated image hosting system on the first party domain for no
good reason and 3. the first party domain image host won't see the cookie and
can't pick an ad that matches the user's profile ("retargeting"). Did you mean
something else?

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wvenable
We do that but Ad-blockers block even those ads. We have our own text-based
adds like Google Adsense text ads which are just <div> tags and those get
filtered out as well.

~~~
jordigh
I work hard to block all ads, including those. It's super helpful if you can
provide an HTML class to your divs so I can more easily block them, but I will
keep on working on blocking all ads by all means possible. I'm thinking of
building an ad extension that doesn't show the ads but reports to js that the
ad is still there, so that websites think that ad is there. It might also help
for some cases to download the ad contents but not display them.

I do not think this is any more immoral than you trying to make my computer
display things I do not want. If you want my money, just ask for it. Don't
tell me via ads to give my money to somone else. Google Contributor is a
promising experiment. Bitcoin micropayments are also convenient.

~~~
johnward
Stop browsing ad supported content then. It's a simple solution that works for
everyone involved. Everyone says "i'd happily pay" but few put their money
where their mouth is.

For the HN downvoters why is choosing not to consume the ad supported content
so bad?

~~~
freehunter
That's like saying "stop downloading F2P games" or "don't support the
RIAA/MPAA". There are really just so few sites that aren't ad supported.

"It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved."

It's literally none of those things. It's not simple, it's not a solution, and
it doesn't work for anyone involved.

~~~
johnward
Leaching content is not much different than the early days of MP3s. So I'm
hopeful we'll find a new business model that works without me having to pay
for every site on the web I want to browse. I can't remember the last time I
pirated an album. The ease of streaming services has made it so convenient
that I don't want to manage local files.

Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the
content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without
ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants
with the data returned but it's still not "right".

~~~
freehunter
We're not talking about dodging a toll booth or throwing a hat over the
security alarms while walking out of a store. I ate a sample at Costco without
buying the product. I got a spray of cologne at Macy's without asking what
brand it was. I went to 7/11 on "free slurpee day" and got my free slurpee and
nothing else. I'm an extreme couponer who walked out the door owing nothing.

I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating
is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects
you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that
you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for
free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything
fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone.
Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension
"Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't
possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.

~~~
trienthusiast
> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3
RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that
lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

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dmritard96
Counting Impressions.

A different model is needed if the publishers servers have to get the ad first
and then give it to the client because the ad server then needs to trust the
publisher to report impressions honestly and the publisher has an incentive to
inflate that number.

~~~
infogulch
A: Drops 'impressions' as the metric for allocating money for ads. Use
something else like clicks which take you to the advertiser's site.

~~~
justizin
Welcome to the 90s, when advertising on the web was not profitable. ;)

I totally agree with what is wrong with advertising on the web, which is
basically everything, but there is also value to impressions.

Let's say a new movie is coming out. I don't care if you go to the movie
website, I just want to get the actors' faces in front of you with a movie
name.

Same goes for a political candidate. I don't need you to go to Bernie Sanders'
website, I just need you to know that he's running and a couple of things that
he stands for.

The problem is that advertising and tracking are inherently connected today.
Want to target ads to people who are likely to respond to them? You need
profiles on all those users. Want privacy? You need to starve the collection
of your data to build profiles.

IMO this is precisely why Google still gives me better results than DuckDuckGo
- not _only_ do they sometimes know who I am and things about me, but their
data set is based on knowing so much about all of us.

I also find that supremely unsettling.

Having worked on ad-driven properties, I'll say it's pretty common to track
things at both ends. The advertiser always wants the impressions / click-
throughs / whatever to be as low as possible, and the operators of the site
want it to be higher. Much negotiation ensues.

Also, most folks don't have direct ad sales, though this is the holy grail in
ad-driven properties, most sites use doubleclick and a suite of others, and
often an intermediary inventory management service which picks the ads which
pay the most for a given hour or day and maybe switch out providers based on
their speed (doubleclick also gets really slow at busy times and will cause
your site not to load :/)

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lolatu54
Ads have many specialized requirements that you wouldn't really want to build
yourself. Tracking, tokenization of url parameters, rotating ads to meet
impression goals, and typically advertisers have build their ads to be served
by major ad networks, so you would have to replicate their systems to support
those ad units. Ads are way more complicated than most people realize.

~~~
georgeott
I've heard some Ad networks are asking clients to setup reverse-proxys, so
they can make the image APPEAR to come from same origin. It's getting crazy!

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eevilspock
I believe a website is responsible for everything that is delivered and all
tracking that happens when they publish a page and deliver it. They don't get
to segregate their content from ad content and wash their hands of
responsibility for any lies or misuse of data by the later.

So forcing domains to host the ads they insert and all the tracking that goes
with makes that more explicit and thus a good thing.

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as1ndu
The reason is one. And it is because ad blockers actually do not affect both
the publishers and ad companies that much. About only less 5% of the internet
users world wide have ever employed ad blockers
([http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/in-bringing-
ad-...](http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/in-bringing-ad-
blocking-t/2128856.html)). I am sure they will move ad serving to the backend
when they get better reasons to shun of client side technology. Its just not
worth it....yet.

~~~
zhobbs
This is changing fast depending on the audience for your content. Some
publishers are now seeing 40%+ of their traffic ad blocked. Some countries are
seeing 30%+ of total population using ad block. Ad block usage is up 41% year
over year...this is going to be a very serious issue very soon for many
publishers.

Some of my numbers are from: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-
of-ad-blockin...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-
blocking-software-suggests-wide-use/?_r=0)

~~~
as1ndu
thanx for the enlightement!!!

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georgeott
Who counts the impressions, to pay the ad client?

~~~
knd775
OP probably means major publishers who can solicit advertisers more directly.

~~~
johnward
Which tend to still use 3rd party ad severs. Probably because they don't want
to develop that tech in house.

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elorant
Because advertisers don't trust publishers. They need a third party agency
with no immediate interest in the game that could guarantee reliable
reporting. For example if the ads are served from the publisher then the
advertising network has no way of identifying fake clicks/impressions made by
botnets.

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r1ch
Tried this once. Ad block maintainers went out of their way to create custom
filters for our site.

~~~
chinathrow
I think the only thing you can do these days is to rotate ad directories _and_
file names constantly, i.e. multiple times each hour just to run around ad
blockers and their maintainers.

Or did you go already that far?

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nickporter
If I made an ad system that needed to track a user, I would want to use my own
domain because then I can save the user's state between websites using my own
domain's local storage.

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harshreality
Ad blockers don't just block domains. They also block (full) url patterns,
which are easily adapted to sites (and there are many) which host ads for
themselves.

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Scoundreller
Slightly OT: If more publishers defaulted to SSL, they would thwart lots of
corporate ad filtering that strips out Adsense and the like.

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seunosewa
It doesnt work. If your site is popular enough, ad blockers would still target
the ads on your website using site-specific rules.

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mbesto

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chinathrow
Followup question to some folks within the ad industry which I'm sure are
reading:

I serve Google AdSense on one of my sites with 10'000 - 20'000 ad impressions
daily. What amount of $ would one expect to make with those impressions if
changing ad networks away from Google? Any recommendations?

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donavanm
Are you starting from a false assumption? Delegation seems like the logical
answer. Content publishers already delegate out a DNS label/domain for CDNs.
Why wouldn't they also delegate a DNS label/domain to a third party for ad
infrastructure?

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chkuendig
1.) cross-domain tracking

2.) ease of integration

3.) independent analytics

