The alternative is to spend hundreds of hours finding widget-related websites, trying to contact the owner(s), negotiating what ad spots are available, what ads are acceptable to run, and what pricing/terms will work for both parties, then managing that relationship over time to ensure ads are actually being displayed, being paid on time, contracts renewed, etc.
It's definitely possible, but you're just doing everything manually that ad networks do for you. Whether that is worth your time (or worth it to hire someone to do this kind of thing for you...) is up to you.
At which point you'll very likely learn that a lot of widget-related websites use ad networks because it saves the 2-3 administrators involved a lot of time and energy.
It's definitely possible for small websites to do ads directly, but it's a lot of work. Often more than is justified for a few thousand dollars a year in ads.
Yeah and there's a reason the tech moved on from that. It was a LOT of work on both ends to negotiate and monitor the relationship. Instead now we have a central broker who both parties work with that has set up a computerized way to manage these relationships.
Personally I think the solution that lets us keep ad supported content and easy ad placement would be for Google to force companies to provide bots they could run internally so the profiles never leave Google's datacenters and strictly monitor the output so the buyer bots don't leak information back to the companies. I think that would do a lot to alleviate the privacy concerns and breaches and is honestly how I though ads were being sold for the longest time instead of profiles being sent to companies buying placement.
> Yeah and there's a reason the tech moved on from that. It was a LOT of work on both ends to negotiate and monitor the relationship. Instead now we have a central broker who both parties work with that has set up a computerized way to manage these relationships.
I'm not disputing the necessity of a central broker. Contexual ads based on search keywords or website content used to work fine without surveillance, and can perfectly be automated by a central broker.
Years ago, I didn't have much issue with online ads (with the exception of popups and spam emails). Nowadays, I'm forced to block them altogether to avoid the extensive surveillance by adtech. It doesn't have to be this way if adtech respected user privacy.
> I think the solution that lets us keep ad supported content and easy ad placement would be for Google to force companies to provide bots they could run internally so the profiles never leave Google's datacenters
Honestly, that wouldn't do much to alleviate my privacy concerns, as it does nothing to protect my privacy from the likes of Google (or other ad-slingers).
Native ads like those can certainly be automated to a great degree, and at the very least use a self-serve interface. "Advertise with us!" links in the sidebar or footer or wherever.
AdSense used to do this for you before it tracked individuals...
You can still target adverts at content on a site, and have an aggregate system to make that easy and granular.
There could even be services which collected lists of websites and categorised them, and the rough demographics of their audience, and retailed slots.
Individual tracking is unnecessary financially, you can make as much revenue without. See example of the New York Time dropping tacking for EU readers for GDPR reasons, and continuing to grow ad revenue: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...
It's definitely possible, but you're just doing everything manually that ad networks do for you. Whether that is worth your time (or worth it to hire someone to do this kind of thing for you...) is up to you.