<story><title>What media companies don’t want you to know about ad blockers</title><url>http://www.cjr.org/opinion/ad_blockers_malware_new_york_times.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Puts</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s strange that the most simple and elegant solution to ad-blocking, self hosted ads are not considered by anyone. Magazines and papers have always done this in print. Yes there is overhead, because you have to handle the content manually and it&amp;#x27;s hard, even tough not impossible to measure impressions. But with print it&amp;#x27;s always been this way and now the media industry wants to both have the cake and eat it, because they don&amp;#x27;t want to handle ads but they want the revenue.&lt;p&gt;And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?&lt;p&gt;- It&amp;#x27;s hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.&lt;p&gt;- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.&lt;p&gt;- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>madeofpalk</author><text>I work for a &amp;#x27;big online old media company&amp;#x27; and can offer some insight for all of this. First up, I strongly believe our industry has dug ourselves into the hole and really fucked itself over. Daily I use an adblocker to make the internet faster and easier to use (which is ironic because I&amp;#x27;m the one who implemented the &amp;#x27;plz disable adblocker&amp;#x27; banner on our site and i see it every single day &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;xQza4fS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;i.imgur.com&amp;#x2F;xQza4fS.png&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Problems with self hosting:&lt;p&gt;- It&amp;#x27;s super duper hard to change the status quo. For them, the current solution &amp;#x27;works fine&amp;#x27;, once they fight the supposed evil that ad blockers are. Trust me, I fight for this sort of stuff and they just don&amp;#x27;t understand things the way we do.&lt;p&gt;- You can&amp;#x27;t do as much or sell ads for as much. You can charge more if you know more data about your visitors and can sell the ads to clients under the impression that it&amp;#x27;ll reach the exact demographic they&amp;#x27;re looking for.&lt;p&gt;- For some companies, it&amp;#x27;s already too much of a chore to have an in-house dev team to manage the content website. Have to have _people_ manage all these self hosted ads is not appealing to these companies. Very similar to AWS vs self-hosting&lt;p&gt;- An image is less interactive, so you can&amp;#x27;t sell it for as much. Those big fancy ads that are interactive are sold more many many more times the price as just a single jpg more.&lt;p&gt;- If you&amp;#x27;re &amp;#x27;lucky&amp;#x27; to work in a media org big enough to have a sales team, even they don&amp;#x27;t sell out every single ad placement all the time - there&amp;#x27;s a big tailed on these states they still want to monetise and ad networks helps them do that.&lt;p&gt;That aside, things are changing. Everything on our site happens over HTTPS, which is a plus. We do win &amp;#x27;arguments&amp;#x27; to move things in-house and not served from an ads network, where appropriate. We have an in-house &amp;#x27;studio team&amp;#x27; who creates custom campaigns and creatives for clients, and they&amp;#x27;re almost entirely self hosted.</text></comment>
<story><title>What media companies don’t want you to know about ad blockers</title><url>http://www.cjr.org/opinion/ad_blockers_malware_new_york_times.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Puts</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s strange that the most simple and elegant solution to ad-blocking, self hosted ads are not considered by anyone. Magazines and papers have always done this in print. Yes there is overhead, because you have to handle the content manually and it&amp;#x27;s hard, even tough not impossible to measure impressions. But with print it&amp;#x27;s always been this way and now the media industry wants to both have the cake and eat it, because they don&amp;#x27;t want to handle ads but they want the revenue.&lt;p&gt;And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?&lt;p&gt;- It&amp;#x27;s hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.&lt;p&gt;- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.&lt;p&gt;- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjevans</author><text>Ads really need to be put on a diet.&lt;p&gt;* Either a &amp;#x2F;static&amp;#x2F; image or colored text&lt;p&gt;* Normalized (re-packed, stripped of all other data, etc)&lt;p&gt;* Vetted by a human somewhere to not be &amp;#x27;misleading in appearance&amp;#x27; (not checking facts, but making sure that it doesn&amp;#x27;t look like a download button or anything else not obviously an ad)&lt;p&gt;* Based on the content of the context and nothing else (you can bake them statically based on the story and&amp;#x2F;or comments thread on the page)</text></comment>