Publishers should take some basic control of the ads on their site, just like it used to be with newspapers and broadcast. Serve them from their own domain, restrict their format (no moving parts or sound, no Javascript at all), vet them for basic decency before publishing. My uBlock Origin setup wouldn't block that.
Good idea, but they are not tech companies, so they likely lack the ability to do so.
I guess they could upscale in tech, but how would they pay for it when they can barely earn enough money to fulfill their primary function?
I don’t think publishers have a problem. I think users do. I hate online news as much as everyone, but I still want deep, intelligent and critical journalism, so I subscribed to a paper which sells it.
It’s one of the most successful news papers of my country, financially, and up until April this year they didn’t have a website. They do now, but it’s basically just a digital version (also available in audio from apps) that you can still only access if you subscribe.
I couldn’t be happier, and they earn money. So maybe the whole free content thing isn’t really a good way to go for either the user or the publisher?
The question arises, what images to serve. Someone has to sell advertisement, find clients, persuade them to advertise with the given site, etc. That's something they are getting with ad networks for free.
Yes, but you can implement all the parent's suggestions without giving that up. Route all the ad requests through trusted intermediate provider on the same .xyz.com domain, where you have all the what-to-serve logic and analytics. Advertisers can then be sure that the numbers of views are legit.
Who owns a server today? Even publishing platforms are outsourced or behind nicely packaged SaaS today, not to mention infrastructure services. There is no more "FTP your site to XYZ".
The problem is there are many smaller publishers on the net where a handful or only one or two people maintain a site. They don't have the capacity to look for advertisers or vet individual ads. That's why they use an ad provider which does this for them.
What you say may work for big news portals and stuff, but if this becomes the norm then it will kill the small publishers resulting in further concentration of net content in the hands of the big guys.
So this direction would hurt the little guys and help the big guys, because they have the resources to adapt.
actually, google should do that. Review all their ads and give them a rating, then allow publishers to pick only high quality ones. But i guess they don't have the money to do that (/s)
Google will continue to try to track me across unrelated websites, so I'll keep blocking them. I crucially specified "serve the ads from the website's own domain".
