Wonder if there’s any way to get advertisers to veto scraped content sites. Not really in their incentive to boycott eyeballs, but if advertisers were actively avoiding those sites, it’d dry up the incentive to make them.
This could backfire, but fining advertisers that show up on those sites might work. The difficulty would be all the claim verification and process of determining what exactly is a “scraped site”, and backfire scenario could be another hurdle for non established sites/more centralization of content. But if you targeted the advertisers rather than the sites themselves, the advertising networks would be incentivized to do that identification themselves.
No. The issue is the means used to target ads on this site are transmitted back to ad servers and used outside this context which is a nightmare scenario.
Someone should write this: an blocker that uploads a screenshot of the page, use OCR to find 'Sponsored' and send back coordinates of the box that can then be painted over client side.
Obviously OCR is one of many strategies and as long you kept the code for these adblock strategies open source, it would work on all visual ads.
Train an AI with a billion screenshots of pages with ads marked out. It should be able to handle 90+% of ads easy.
Sounds like a great idea. I'd love to allow ads like The Deck and Fusion ads, but my Ad Muncher (on Windows) practices a scorched earth policy where everything is hidden. If I had my own site, I would probably not even be able to see them.
This sounds perfect, and it's more in line with a cogent policy of rewarding good ads and punishing bad ones.
This approach sounds much harder for an ad network to pull off and sounds like it would add a lot of risk and complication. For example, what if a web master decides they don't want to have ads on their site anymore. Whoever just paid for that space gets screwed.
Maybe if IPFS (~web 3.0) succeeds in the future, you could solve the advertising problem by inventing a meta network, where all the sites involved would agree to follow certain standardized criteria of site purity. You'd tag the nodes (or sites), and then have an option to search only sites from the pure network. Just a thought.
edit: Maybe this would lead to a growing interest in the site purity, and as the network's popularity would grow, you could monetize the difference to its advance.
I think you have the right solution. I whitelist any site that takes this approach. If everyone did this, ad-tech would be forced to change and publishers would benefit from visitors who appreciate the efforts and better UX. The web could actually become fast.
I'd be surprised if the ad companies aren't already giving the publishers who run their ad units a script that allows data to be tracked through it "locally" and which then proxies to/from the ad company. A minor headache but probably worth it for them.
For everyone saying this ruins impression tracking, couldn't an ad-network just act as a "CDN" (e.g. client <-- Ad-CDN <-- server). They'd basically man-in-the-middle the server response and inject the ads into wherever in the html the server put the ad-tags. To the client, it would still be SSAI, but the Ad-CDN could still record impressions.
Not that any server owner should do this (giving over control of your website ultimately to the ad-network? fuck that), but as ad-tech becomes more desperate, shouldn't these types of MITM setups get pushed more?
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.
Arh yes. Thats almost exactly what I was talking about. I think its a good idea, although getsatisfaction's implementation (language, high fee to remove competing ads) is not great.
If the ads are hosted from the same domain or even same IP as the main web content, this is hard to do. Done effectively, it's not possible to distinguish ads from the wanted content without inspecting the web content.
Maybe follow the link and evaluate the ad:content ratio or just the raw number of different ad services on the page. Seems like the collateral damage to such an approach would largely improve the overall web experience.
I like this analogy. It would be interesting to see a similar mechanism to banner ads. I'd imagine part of the responsibility would be on the ad network and part of it would be on the publisher.
Showing a bunch of low-quality "1 weird trick ads?" the network gets flagged. Trying to squeeze too many ads onto a single page? Publisher gets flagged.
I doubt we'll see such a thing. On the other hand ad networks like the deck, carbon and yoggrt have done a good job filtering out bad ads. I generally whitelist sites with those networks.
To actually enforce the policy described in that link, would require authenticating websites when rendering ads. Otherwise, one could just embed an ad from a different domain, and easily defeat this process.
This could backfire, but fining advertisers that show up on those sites might work. The difficulty would be all the claim verification and process of determining what exactly is a “scraped site”, and backfire scenario could be another hurdle for non established sites/more centralization of content. But if you targeted the advertisers rather than the sites themselves, the advertising networks would be incentivized to do that identification themselves.
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