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
The very last thing the Internet needs is more ads.
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?
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)>
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.