I've come to decide that the only ads I consider "legit" are where the site owner strikes a deal with another business that is interested in advertising on their site, the site owner hosts the ad on their own server, as a picture banner or text or perhaps a nice block in a side column that says "sponsored content" or whatever, and just links to the other business.
Site owner controls all the content. Any tracking will be done mainly via server logs, if the site owner wants to they can use a bit of script to quickly shove in a redirect onmousedown, in order to track exactly when the user clicked what link. But frankly I've found even that technique a privacy insult ever since I noticed Google doing this in their own search results.
This is analogous to how paper newspapers used to manage their ad space. No third party shit, and if the magazine was proud of itself it would curate the ads to only deal with advertisers that wouldn't annoy their reader base (too much).
A bit of a hassle maybe, but it shows your readers that you actually care about what content is displayed on your site (let alone what code is run). But most importantly, no adblocker will block these kinds of ads. Because they're just image links, after all. Adblocker can't see if that's an ad banner or just a thumbnail linking to an external domain. And I would maybe even bother to whitelist those if they did (right until one shows me crap I don't want to see, like being confronted with nudity or sex when I'm not in the mood for it).
>I've come to decide that the only ads I consider "legit" are where the site owner strikes a deal with another business that is interested in advertising on their site, the site owner hosts the ad on their own server, as a picture banner or text or perhaps a nice block in a side column that says "sponsored content" or whatever, and just links to the other business.
I agree. When it comes to ads for niche content (blogs, forums, etc). The ad industry sells online ads like they're TV commercials but the companies buying the ads should be looking at them like partially sponsoring a race team in exchange for your logo showing up in front of people who are interested in your type of products/services.
Site owner controls all the content. Any tracking will be done mainly via server logs, if the site owner wants to they can use a bit of script to quickly shove in a redirect onmousedown, in order to track exactly when the user clicked what link. But frankly I've found even that technique a privacy insult ever since I noticed Google doing this in their own search results.
This is analogous to how paper newspapers used to manage their ad space. No third party shit, and if the magazine was proud of itself it would curate the ads to only deal with advertisers that wouldn't annoy their reader base (too much).
A bit of a hassle maybe, but it shows your readers that you actually care about what content is displayed on your site (let alone what code is run). But most importantly, no adblocker will block these kinds of ads. Because they're just image links, after all. Adblocker can't see if that's an ad banner or just a thumbnail linking to an external domain. And I would maybe even bother to whitelist those if they did (right until one shows me crap I don't want to see, like being confronted with nudity or sex when I'm not in the mood for it).