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Ask HN: What's a good primer on online advertising?

7 points| rquantz | 14 years ago | reply

I've been working for a while now for an online magazine that, not surprisingly, gets most of its revenue from advertising. I'm not primarily responsible for handling ad serving, but I am asked to deal with it occasionally, and I find that advertising has a lot of jargon and repurposed words that, when strung together, don't make a lot of sense to me.

Google seems strangely devoid of useful information. I can look at the documentation for our various ad providers, but I find that they: 1) are generally terrible, 2) have barely functional search and are not indexed by Google, and 3) assume that I already know what all the jargon means. There are "Online Advertising for Dummies" books, but they seem to be from the perspective of advertisers, not publishers, and I doubt they would explain the difference between an impression and a view, for instance.

Can anyone here who has already navigated similar waters point me to any resources that provide a good introduction to video and banner advertising from the publisher's perspective that's aimed at developers?

5 comments

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[+] jakeludington|14 years ago|reply
The IAB is the authoritative source for advertising information. Most of the major advertisers and publishers utilize their guidelines for both creative and measurement. http://www.iab.net/ad_unit

To address your specific example, there may or may not be any difference between an impression and a view. In the case where one page shows one ad display, you would get a single impression and a single view. If there are multiple ad blocks on the page, it's possible that the same ad could show in more than one ad block, resulting in multiple impressions for a single view.

[+] rquantz|14 years ago|reply
Isn't this a bit like responding to someone asking for a primer on web development by pointing them to the w3c?

I realize the comparison isn't perfect -- IAB's docs aren't nearly as opaque as a w3c spec, and I should probably go back and look at them now that I've been doing this for a few months. When I got started working with these guys, though, and I was desperately trying to figure out what I needed to know about VAST and VPAID in order to not look like an idiot (answer: very little, in this case), IAB felt pretty dense and still assumed I knew basically what was going on.

[+] earl|14 years ago|reply
Hi -- I know quite a bit about this stuff (worked at Scribd on the pub side, Quantcast on the DSP side, and Yodle doing sem). Contact me offline if you'd like to talk. Email is in my profile.