User blog comment:Tedgill/Making Ads Better: How We're Going to Do It/@comment-1824272-20170120201518/@comment-20644-20170120202948

One of the benefits with direct ads is that we work directly with clients to make them, so we have control over performance standards in ways that we don't with programmatic ads. With direct, we're making the ads or helping to make the ads. With programmatic, we're receiving the ads and then have to penalize ad partners who send them to us if their performance isn't acceptable. So in terms of performance, if it's not performing well then it's either a bug or an issue with the device. Cleaning up the page of ad clutter should also help improve performance.

As for mobile, yeah those are currently a problem. Direct ads will actually help with that. As will tech changes that enable us to run the same direct ad campaign on desktop and mobile at the same time. That will make the mobile ads better, rather than relying mostly on programmatic ads that are on mobile now. One of the difficulties, though, is that space is limited on mobile so sometimes the ad does have to pop up. But the performance on that can be better than it is now.