> Serve and image and/or some text along with a link and call it done.
I'm amazed too. But I'm also fairly certain publishers would love to do that. It's just not as practical as you make it sound. (And frankly, if you do come up with a solution for this, by all means reach out and let's bring it to the ad tech market; we'll rapidly make a fortune.)
For starters, how do you deal with ad fraud? What do you do with fraudulent sites that e.g. stack dozens of ads on top of each other so they all count as views? Or those that have zombie devices replay actual site visits and ad clicks? Or those that have toolbars replace ads with something else? Picture an EasyJet special offer popping up in the middle of your screen as you're pulling out your CC to book a ticket on RyanAir. This type of stuff happens; many times without the offending company even knowing how its ads got served to a zombie device. Companies lose billions per year to ad fraud. It's an enormous problem. Whether it's PPV (ad stacking), PPC (click bots), or PPA (CC fraud), you need some sort of tracking to weed out fraud.
And then there's the logistics of the whole thing. In theory there are more user-friendly ways to market and serve ads than real time bidding platforms. In practice, not so much. Apple tried to sell vetted ads at one point with a direct sales force to interact with relevant brands; it miserably failed. Similarly, there used to be a rather high quality ad network that ran image/text-only ads on Daring Fireball and a bunch of other sites; it eventually shut down. Selling your own ads is a non-starter unless you've a large audience already. So the truth is, and for better or worse, the simpler and cheaper way to buy and sell ads may very well be RTB for the foreseeable future.
You're making it far more complicated than it should be.
Why do you care how many people saw the ad? What you care about is results. If you run an ad and accrue benefits of $50,000, you are happy if the ad campaign cost less than that.
You've a contradiction in your statement. If I get a positive ROI tomorrow on those $50k, it's fine on paper. But if it turns out that a large chunk of the ad spend went to fraudsters without me having any idea it did, such as what happened with P&G [1], what's to stop the latter from doubling down on their activities? (The real losers here are genuine publishers like news outfits, btw.) And how do I know it's the $50k ad spend rather than what the content team has been up to in the past month? Or that the $50k wouldn't have been better spent on SEO efforts or on PR outreach?
Say you sell lamps. If you spend $5000 next month on digital ads and you are able to attribute new sales of $6000 to that ad campaign, then why do you care what the impression numbers were? All that matters is that sales went up by a big enough amount.
The company selling ads can't tell you how effective the ads were. Only you know that.
Here's a more concrete and practical example: If you spend $50k on content marketing and SEO, and another $50k on ads, which is giving you the best bang for your buck?
In the current JS-based ad world you can go: my ROI on the first is X with reasonable confidence; and on the second I believe it is Y after discounting for [heaps of ad fraud-related reasons] -- which is not great, but still better than no idea.
In a text/image only ad world you'd go: my ROI on the first is X with reasonable confidence; on the second I've absolutely no idea except that the numbers are getting worst by the month because of [heap of ad fraud related reasons].
The main victim here, I should point out in passing, are the websites you're getting your news from.
And yes, you're somewhat correct, the company selling ads can't tell you how effective the ads ultimately are. But only they can tell you if the ad likely got served to an actual human rather than to a bot, among other schemes. And knowing that a bot is likely browsing your site can make a world of difference with your boss when you're reporting on whether you should spend more on content/SEO or online ads, or with your payment provider when someone is testing stolen CCs on your SaaS sign-up form.
> The main victim here, I should point out in passing, are the websites you're getting your news from.
The main victim is the user. We are tracked and profiled a million different ways. Shitty ad-tech devours our bandwidth and batteries and makes everything feel worse. I'd wager that end users are often paying more for the bandwidth and power to receive an ad than the publisher is getting paid to show the ad.
Well, speaking as a marketer, I'd beg to ask what you're selling me if you're unable to show me what I'm getting for my ad spend. If I'm worrying about branding for a large company, then yeah, perhaps I'd happily pay for billboard ads, TV ads, radio ads, or some placement on a high traffic website. More realistically I'm working with an SMB and when they pay a few thousands on ads they want to know their ROI so they can decide if it's moving the needle or not.
Also, PPC and PPA are what SMBs prefer to buy. PPV only holds its ground when used for brand recognition purposes, with the caveat that it's hilariously easy for fraudulent publishers to stack ads on top of each other and get away with it.
> I'd beg to ask what you're selling me if you're unable to show me what I'm getting for my ad spend
How could we tell you that? You know better than anybody what your revenue numbers are. A billion impressions isn't worth anything if it doesn't affect anything you measure.
As you just said: a billion impressions aren't worth anything if it doesn't affect anything you measure. And that's the whole problem in the ad industry. Are you buying ads to:
- Build your brand/awareness/mailing list?
- Get marketing qualified leads that your sales will handle?
- Get sales for your SaaS without going through sales?
- Something else?
Each of these require different type of tracking - views, clicks, actions. More importantly though, each is subjected to ad fraud. And simple text/image ads won't let you detect the latter to weed it out of your stats.
And the event you're thinking "so? as long as your ROI is positive you're fine" the answer is no, it's not good, because it incites more fraud and the budget might have been better spent on content marketing or other efforts.
And none of that requires JS to be delivered to the browser beyond the script that loaded the ad itself. The ad networks should pass whatever appropriate data to each other, not the browser.
The company/server that serves the images can count... they also get a referer for the host in question... and while I may be OK with google to load a script for the ads they serve, there is NO reason for anything inside what they serve to bring down any other JS.
Per the answer I gave to a separate answer, there's more than meets the eye when you're measuring an online ROI. Text/image only ads would prevent adequate ad fraud tracking. Take the naive scenario where you add some utm parameters to your PPC campaign and call it a day. The next thing you know you can have a bunch of bots crawling your site owing to click bots and referral spam, alongside fake user bots building profiles by replaying bits and pieces of actual traffic sessions, the two combining to messing up your traffic stats. And if you're large enough to have sophisticated fraudsters target your site, another cohort of bots might show up registering to your SaaS to test stolen CC numbers, messing up your sign up stats to boot.
And, don't get me wrong here. I'm an engineer too and I've been using ad blockers for longer than I've been neck deep into marketing and sales. I just get where you're coming from. But the sorrier realities on the ground are not as simple as one might think from afar.
I'm amazed too. But I'm also fairly certain publishers would love to do that. It's just not as practical as you make it sound. (And frankly, if you do come up with a solution for this, by all means reach out and let's bring it to the ad tech market; we'll rapidly make a fortune.)
For starters, how do you deal with ad fraud? What do you do with fraudulent sites that e.g. stack dozens of ads on top of each other so they all count as views? Or those that have zombie devices replay actual site visits and ad clicks? Or those that have toolbars replace ads with something else? Picture an EasyJet special offer popping up in the middle of your screen as you're pulling out your CC to book a ticket on RyanAir. This type of stuff happens; many times without the offending company even knowing how its ads got served to a zombie device. Companies lose billions per year to ad fraud. It's an enormous problem. Whether it's PPV (ad stacking), PPC (click bots), or PPA (CC fraud), you need some sort of tracking to weed out fraud.
And then there's the logistics of the whole thing. In theory there are more user-friendly ways to market and serve ads than real time bidding platforms. In practice, not so much. Apple tried to sell vetted ads at one point with a direct sales force to interact with relevant brands; it miserably failed. Similarly, there used to be a rather high quality ad network that ran image/text-only ads on Daring Fireball and a bunch of other sites; it eventually shut down. Selling your own ads is a non-starter unless you've a large audience already. So the truth is, and for better or worse, the simpler and cheaper way to buy and sell ads may very well be RTB for the foreseeable future.