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They are rare but do exist, see ethicalads and Modrinth’s ad program


They are still third-party ad networks that require a browser to cross multiple domains, etc. etc. etc.

I am not ideologically opposed to advertisements but I do believe the only safe ads are first party hosted coming from the same domain.


most people publishing a website either cannot or do not care to host the ad server on the same domain, they just want to monetize the site.

things could get a lot better, but this self hosting suggestion in particular will never see wide adoption unless major hosting providers build it and host for their customers. most people don't even bother to self-host/bundle stuff like their fonts and JS libraries unless they have have a JS framework in the loop doing it for them.


Pack before the web most places doing ads had them al, in house, salesmen (mostly male) design and so on., large byers (mcdonalds) might hire an agency to talk to all the little newspapers, but even the little ones did this in house.


> most people publishing a website either cannot or do not care to host the ad server on the same domain, they just want to monetize the site.

That's sort of beside the point, though. The site owner's commitment to running ads is useless unless there are people to view them, and, as long as unsafe ads are ubiquitous, the only safe advice to give to people is that they should run ad blockers everywhere. It doesn't matter that that isn't what the site owner wants to happen.


there are plenty of site owners that would voluntarily choose a more ethical ad hosting network if it was a good and easy option.

adding a pain-in-the-ass hurdle like "has to be hosted on the same domain" that 99.99% of people won't see the value of or understand is only going to hurt adoption of the better solutions.


> adding a pain-in-the-ass hurdle like "has to be hosted on the same domain" that 99.99% of people won't see the value of or understand is only going to hurt adoption of the better solutions.

Right, but that's my point—this is not a situation where visitors have to hope that site owners will be responsive to their preferences; rather, visitors are in a position to enforce their preferences via ad blockers, so there's no incentive for them to compromise on matters that, however poorly appreciated or understood, genuinely can affect security.


agree - but that gets to the larger point that mass adoption of anything like has to be fairly frictionless.

We are barely getting a third of people to use adblockers - you'd have to squeeze the ad server industry a lot more to make them change. How to squeeze them? Get more people to use an adblocker that enforces serving from the same domain. How to get more people to use an adblocker? Make it frictionless, like enabled by default on browsers.

Then by squeezing them, they would be forced to respond by building tooling making it more frictionless to serve ads form the same domain, etc.


Who said anything about an ad server ?

An ad is a particularly sized JPEG that you place in your images directories… and then point to with an HTML tag.

Everything we tried to build for you was lost once you deviated from that level of complexity.


one suggestion more arrogant, ridiculous, and in bad faith than the last

you're now implying everyone hosting a website should pound the pavement to sell their own ads - or use a a static export from an ad network and build it into the website themselves? Sure maybe they should but they never will. Dream on.

> Everything we tried to build for you

You are a speck of dust in the universe of computing. Get a grip.


Modrinth’s ads are this way.




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