so I was looking at someone’s personal website from Mastodon, and noticed that they had banners to advertise other people’s servers. while server lists like fediring exist, I was thinking of a more automatic method of advertisement within someone’s website.

the concept is this: people could store advertisements (small banners, gifs) on their websites with a server and people willing to embed them could use an API to retrieve a random ad onto their website.

people would self-host their ads and “federate” with other websites to embed other ads on their website. not sure if this would scale up as well, though.

what do you think? just curious on lemmy’s POV

edit: going by the comments, this idea is quite flawed and webrings (in small sizes) are a better approach.

thanks for the help

  • V HEnglish
    12•1 year ago

    This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

    A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their “neighbours” in the ring that’d eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you’ll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery “someone else’s problem” and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      you’re right that abuse would be the biggest issue, made worse if people host ads for many people. ideally people would naturally host few ads in a similar fashion to smaller instances (ideally) federating with few instances? also didn’t realise that so many webrings still exist until I searched them up

  • @troydowlingEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    The very last thing the Internet needs is more ads.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•1 year ago

      Ads are annoying and can be privacy intrusive depending upon the ad network. However, do u have a better funding model in mind to keep these open sourced alternatives up and running?

      Donation based models don’t rlly work that well. Restricting stuff behind a paywall is an option, but ethically a little icky one. Ads are the best in these cases, right?

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I’ll just copy a previous reply:

      the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

      no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

      (although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn’t sound good)>

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      I like ads as long as they aren’t super personalized and advertising companies didn’t track my every move I made to deliver it to me.

      Plus if admins directly hosted ads they’d get 100% of the revenue, massive advertising companies routinely scalp the revenue and only give pennies to admins that host them.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

      no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

      (although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn’t sound good)

  • @[email protected]English
    3•1 year ago

    Somewhat related, there is a site I follow called royalroad. Royalroad is a site for web serials, which are basically books uploaded to the internet chapter by chapter.

    Although royalroad used to be only google ads, at some point they started accepting user submitted ads. (Also, ads on that site have always been unobtrusive).

    I like these ads much better because they are more privacy respecting (literally an a image and a link).

    Also, they are really funny. User’s with no art skills will make memes, or doodle stick figures, and I clicked on that one anyways, and the story was soooo good.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      these simple type of ads used in the early internet was exactly the idea I was going for, having little involved to breach privacy or be used as an attack vector. more individual user ads was also what I was imagining, and looking at them, they are quite funny too

  • poVoqEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    For blogs there are also ping-backs, which serve a similar function, i.e. if a blog-post is mentioned on another blogging site the original page is automatically notified via the comment section of the blog-post in question.

  • umami_wasabiEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    There are numerous problems other:

    • content governance
    • format standardization
    • malvertisement prevention
    • XSS possibility
    • Loading time to different advertiser’s server (subject to implementation)
    • Revenue (if monetary based, which may involve going down the cryptocurrency, tracking/privacy, ad fruad, etc. rabbit hole)
    • Ad blockers

    That’s what I think of off of my head.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago
      1. people would choose individual websites (likely their friends) to host ads of, although list making would be problematic
      2. ideally would just serve images or gifs with as simple an API as possible
      3. similar idea to point 1 but abuse of such a system would be an issue (eg. a website is hacked and changed to inappropriate ads). one of the concept’s main implications
      4. similar idea to point 2: videos could also be problematic though
      5. potentially some form of client-side (website) caching? this whole thing is just an idea, so I really don’t know how it work
      6. no revenue - and therefore breaches of privacy and tracking would be unlikely - as the servers would be individually hosted, and therefore decentralised. however, this approach would make it significantly easier for malicious parties to pay users for ads.
      • as to whether or not that happens would be the user’s decision, although (at least right now) such advertising sounds more costly and hard to enforce.
      1. you’re right that ad-blockers could (although probably not at first) be used to block ads, as the ads would be for other personal websites (no real ad protection needed as per point 6), some could unblock them knowing that they would be more ethical (again, just a concept). this would be a problem though as most visitors would have an ad-blocker regardless.

      thanks for the points

  • umami_wasabiEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I don’t quite grasp the concept.

    Are you asking for a decentralized DoubleClick copy? What you mean by “automatic”? What problem you’re trying to solve? Who are the audiences? You said personal websites then who is the advertiser? If that’s other personal websites, what are they going to advertise?

    I don’t use Mastodon so could you please elaborate more? Thanks.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      I’ll try explain the idea more concisely:

      • user wants to promote own website
      • user creates ads (small banners and gifs) like these and hosts them on an instance of the software through their website
        • the server-side implementation would have an API to fetch the URL of the advertisements from to embed to the website (just simple image files or gifs)
      • user asks other people (friends, others in the fediverse) to save their website on these peoples’ own lists of websites that they are willing to host the ads for
        • people would host based off of similar content, interesting topics, and general goodwill as opposed to exposure (as very few personal websites get constant exposure to large audiences) and revenue (as this would be a willing move)
      • the client-side implementation of those hosting other websites’ ads would randomly pick a URL from the user’s own list (similar to picking a random URL from a webring), use the API (something like /get_ad?) to retrieve the URL of a random ad from the promoting user and display that on their website
      • “automatic” was a bad word choice, I’ll change it now
      • this wouldn’t solve a problem, just automate the functions of webrings by giving every user their own decentralised “webring” (the list of websites) and displaying user-curated ads (probably at the bottom of the page where most banners are) as opposed to randomly picking from a webring
      • those using personal websites would be the users, while visitors would be the audience.

      should’ve made the wording more clearer in the post, my bad I guess. and to clarify, this is just an concept I thought about though and I don’t actually have plans to develop this. (I’ve also edited the post with my final opinion on the subject.)