alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer?
On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)
On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."
I only really see those two options.
Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?
There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.
(Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
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Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around
Yeah, I don't mind the static, manually selected ads too much. They tend to be much less annoying, and for better/more relevant services and products.
And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!
I know of one but it's niche. OpenSubtitles allows people to pay for ads at the start/end of content when you download subtitles on the fly. I've seen countless NordVPN ads in subtitles.
Even if the ethics on the advertiser's side could be solved, advertising as the core source of income for a business has it's own unenthical incentives imo. It ultimately boils down to more attention == more ads == more money. I'd argue we got an early preview of that effect when 24 hour news channels were coming into their own in the 90s and 00s, and the detrimental effect it had on the quality of programming and frankly truthfulness. The scale of the internet has only exacerbated those issues.
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
I built my own platform for what I call ethical ads that is serving ads for my own site. No profiling of users allowed, but I allow very specific targeting for content.
I haven't investigated to see what sort of JavaScript, etc that they are using, but as a user looking at ads by carbon[1] seem to be pretty chill. This could perhaps meet an in-between you are looking for.
I built EthicalAds (https://www.ethicalads.io/) for exactly this reason.
No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text.
We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.