After consultation with our ad provider, SDMB ads will likely resume on Monday following a midday meeting to review details. A number of steps have been taken to prevent a recurrence of previous problems. Specifically:
Ads will initially be limited to a subset of sources. If no problems surface after a week, we’ll consider adding additional sources. Sources known to have contributed malware in the past have been excluded.
Our ad provider has an ongoing automated process that tests a sampling of ads and flags those behaving anomalously. Sampling frequency will be increased.
We hypothesize that users who spend a great deal of time on the SDMB are more likely to be hit with malware because of the way the ad bidding process works. To avoid this suspected problem, once a user has been shown a specified number of ads within a defined period, all additional ads will be house ads.
We will confer with our ad provider periodically to review any issues that arise.
We believe this is a reasonable way to proceed, and will monitor the situation closely. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Yeah, there are already ads on every thread between the first and second posts (mostly testosterone ads) but I think Ed is talking about bringing back the banner ads too.
The ads that you currently see are from a smaller provider, that didn’t have any problems. The ads that will return are the ones from the larger provider, that had some… ah… problems a few weeks ago.
So you’ve had a chat with the ad provider who has repeatedly failed to prevent hostile ads. I’m sure that is all that was needed. Forgive me for not turning adblock off.
I guess I don’t know much about the online ad industry. Where do the ads come from? Why do ad brokers not maintain a chain of custody on ad content and prevent any “anomalous” ads from being served? Somebody is inserting bad ads into the stream, and I don’t understand why they have that control. They should have to submit all advertising to the broker, who certifies every ad safe for serving, and the broker should be held legally responsible if malicious advertising is served. The model that permits advertisers to serve their own content and change it without out strict oversight (not random sampling) is broken.
It’s not part of the business model; it’s an unintended consequence of the way “real-time bidding” works. As I understand it, when a user loads a page, calls for the ads on it are sent to our ad provider, which puts them out for bid. Presumably legitimate advertisers, who have a specific audience in mind, and who know the first page loaded is worth the most (because who knows if you’ll come back for a second one), will bid the highest, win the auction, and show their ad. Most ad contracts are written so that a given user is only shown the same ad X times in Y hours. After the top bidder’s allocation is used up, you drop down to the next highest bidder, and so on down the line.
The most frequent SDMB users, who are on for hours a day, will be shown scores, maybe even hundreds of ads, by which time the bidding process will have gotten down to the bottom of the barrel. Most low-bid advertisers are legitimate in the sense that they aren’t sending out malware. However, you have to assume the bad guys aren’t going to spend big money doing their evil deeds, and the bottom of the bidding barrel is where they probably lurk. Since frequent users are the only ones who get down that far, they’re more likely to get hit.
I emphasize this is only a hypothesis. However, it costs us little to cap the number of ads a user sees. We currently get ~6M visits/mo, and have ~6K active users. Let’s say 600 are hard core. If at a certain point we stop showing them ads (which are low bid anyway), we forego a trivial amount of revenue.
One thing you should know: if you routinely see Sun-Times house ads during your SDMB sessions, you’re an addict.
I have made this same argument. I think there should be some kind of ad certification process, browsers should be designed to refuse uncertified ads, and there should be a better way to trace misbehaving ads. (Right now it’s a PITA.) At present, though, the online ad industry isn’t set up for this.
Google has become much more aggressive about blacklisting sites it thinks are doing bad things, and while this is exasperating to site operators, it has the potential benefit of bringing the malware issue front and center. We beef to our ad provider, they beef to their bidding partners, and at some point maybe everybody will decide it’s worth their while to establish an ad certification process.
Selling your own ad space and bypassing a broker would solve this problem as you’d be the one certifying all ads. You could also serve more GIF or JPG ads that aren’t would bypass Adblock as it wouldn’t see them as ads if they’re served from the SDMB server.