Online Advertisements are Broken

They're everywhere: Ads. No matter if you take the subway, drive on a highway, read the news, watch a video, check what's happening on social media, or visit any website — ads are there to sell you the next big thing, or maybe to try and change your impression of global corporations. Some are more spammy than others. But what we can all agree on, is that they're intrusive and annoying.

Why we need advertisements

Creating content for users is a delight for some, and for others, a pure way of making hard cash. Even if you love making content for others, maybe even free to use/read, you might find yourself in a similar position as myself: you have a following, and you want to make a buck or two. In the first place, I want to even out my expenses, but it would sure be nice to receive something in exchange for countless hours of effort to ensure qualitative content — and I'm not talking about much. Understandably, there aren't a lot of people out there who are too keen about subscribing to yet another site's subscription for advantage X, Y, and Z. The only major other way of monetization is implementing ads — from somewhere. If you have a large reach, you might find sponsors who are willing to give you a flat or variable amount based on your user base, monthly visitors, clicks, and more. But if you have a small site you want to monetize, you'll likely have no luck finding a trustworthy sponsor, and ads remain as the only option.

As we all know, if something is available for free without any obvious means of payment or monetization, either the creator is really kind, which is sadly not so common, or you & your data are the means of monetization.

Publishers, Advertisers, and Platforms

Sure, the placement of an ad determines the impression of the user. In the end, poor Volvo doesn't decide if the user learns about their new all-electric car via an in-text ad or a popup ad, even though the resulting mood & impression of the user greatly differs. So, that's clearly in the hands of the publisher (aka. the website integrating the ad), but the general influence still lies in the hands of the advertising platform.

Platforms like Google AdSense are known for their intrusive data collection and resulting, highly personalized ads. From the perspective of the user, it feels like having billboards changed in front of your eyes — just for you. Implementing ads from a platform like Google AdSense may leave a negative impression by the user, since it shows that you do not really care about the privacy of your users, although, from your perspective, Google AdSense might look like one of the more trustworthy platforms to choose for your monetization needs. They moderate ads pretty well (although there are quite a few examples of bad moderation) and have reliable payouts. That leaves publishers in a moral dilemma: implement intrusive ads or rely on less known, maybe even spammy & unreliable advertising platforms.

Searching for a fix

There are A LOT of advertising platforms out there. But one or more of the following downsides always seem to exist with them:

• not privacy-friendly
• no well known (small amount of advertisers)
• high fees or low payment
• untrustworthy/spammy ads
• unreliable (with advertisements, availability, or payouts)
• only available for bigger sites (with 10,000 impressions or more per month)
• advertisements only for a certain category, e.g. development

For this site, I have looked at three major advertisers: Intravert, Ethical Ads and Carbon Ads. Firstly, I do not meet the requirements for Ethical Ads and Carbon Ads. LazyCodersClub is just too new and doesn't have enough visitors. The target demographic should fit (developers) and their ad style (mainly text ads) is interesting.

Then, there's Intravert. The idea behind their service is really cool: you create ad spots on your site and market them for a certain price. Advertisers can book their ad on your site through Intravert and see it's performance. Since Intravert doesn't personalize ads for your users, it's already more privacy-friendly than AdSense. The main problem with them is that they're not so well known, so there aren't a lot of advertisers who'll stumble upon your site on there.

Problems with solving the problem

"Why search any longer?" I thought to myself. It can't be that hard to create a little ad network myself, and indeed I'm on it! I have registered duckads.net (rudely named with inspiration from the oh-so-popular private search engine "DuckDuckGo" as it seems like ducks are associated with privacy-friendliness).

I made a concept for myself, which seems to have ended up quite close to Sublime Ads, a really cool self-advertising platform. So, I needed to go in a slightly different direction. I wanted to add a marketplace of sorts, where advertisers can buy a spot for an ad, which, if the publisher accepts it, will automatically show in the corresponding ad spot.

Here come the problems: neither do I have any sites who are instantly willing to use my platform, nor any advertisers who are interested in buying ad spots — and I haven't even started with payment infrastructure & taxes. How would I handle moderation? I have no idea. How would I ensure high quality ad placements on the publisher side, and high quality ads on the advertiser side? I have no idea. How would I make sure that publishers can't just click on their own ads all the time and rip off advertisers while still remaining privacy-friendly? I have no idea.

It's not as easy as it might seem at first — but I haven't given up. Maybe at some point I'll find solutions and answers to my problems and questions. The demand is there, and a lot of small creators like myself would surely like to monetize their hard work. These problems I encountered might be reasons for the lack of privacy-friendly, high-quality advertising platforms out there. Both Ethical Ads & Carbon Ads have big companies behind them (ReadTheDocs & BuySellAds) which allows them to enter this industry without a lot of fuss.

Maybe you, the reader, have the right skill set for this task. Maybe you'll be able to offer the leap to a privacy-friendly monetization platform. But for now, that's why online ads are broken.