Do newspaper work with individual advertisers, or do they work mostly through local marketing firms? The answer is again the same as above. Buying a news ad is commonly done through a marketing firm and the news paper is always responsible for what is printed.
Very few publisher in any media deals with individual advertise clients, and yet it works. Responsibility is done through contracts, through professional liability and standards, and as last resort through business insurance. As a result, its quite uncommon to see illegal ads on physical newspapers, on TV, on busses, and on other physical objects.
Now, they do also do more manual vetting, but they can afford to, because again, the ads cost more. Maybe online ads need to cost more too. It just means that some fraction of the current legitimate advertisers will no longer have sustainable business models.
Almost a decade ago, ads about subscription services went through a major change. The government dislike how "free" was used in services where all the costs was hidden in the fine print. As such, all ads related to subscriptions was changed so the the total price must be very explicit in the ad. The TV, news papers and street advertisement immediately changed as a result, mostly by stopping having advertisement for such services. They were afterward put back once marketing firms learned how to stay compliant with the decision.
Even further back in history there was a ruling against advertisement that targeted children, where there was one particular channel that went a bit further than everyone else. After the ruling, they stopped.
Now, one could assume that the sword is only dangling above the TV networks and the news papers are running wild with scamming advertisement. Except that I can find rulings (by the consumer protection agency) that target advertisement in print. A ruling in 2003 made a decision against a home catalog, ordering the company to stop printing a style of advertisement (about weight control) or face a fine of $40000 per issue.
Sweden don't have much general classified ads in newspapers, so I guess that might answer why I don't see so many shady versions. Jobs ads are done through the government job agency, and selling things through newspapers tend to be quite expensive so its almost exclusively about cars, boats or houses. Criminals tend to target cheap alternatives so that a failed attempt has less of a sunk cost, which means those who has no vetting process and minimal investment.
Or you could have ad networks that only circulate carefully vetted/curated ads.
Imagine if you had an ad network that was picky and only allowed ads that were clever/interesting, short, not annoying, and didn't lead to malicious/fake products!
Also, even if you could catch everything with manual human vetting of every ad, it would be cost-prohibitive. (Either you would have to pay less to publishers, or charge more to advertisers. The latter would likely be a non-starter, because it is already difficult for most small advertisers to run positive ROI campaigns. The former would put further pressure on publishers, making them even less likely to accept the risk of these proposed lawsuits.)
I would love to see online advertising improved, and I think there are certainly possible ways to go about it. I'm just trying to illustrate that it's not as easy as, "don't let people publish or distribute bad ads."
To borrow the analogy from the article, we couldn't stop spam by going after the email providers for allowing it through.
No, you make it simpler than that
you simply forbid ads to be interactive or to contain any code
eg. you do only static ads like text, image, video
no code, no way to hide nasty stuff
It's not just the graphic used by the ad, it's also the ad's destination.
The clickthrough rate on internet ads is execrable. Frequently in the fractions of a percent at best.
No other advertising space operates on the assumption that linking represents.
Eliminating linking and leaving pure visual ads would be in line with every other form of advertising in existence, and eliminate the "problem" of click fraud, link-bait, and actually fraudulent links.
Do we really need a business model that exists largely to enable ad networks to defraud each other and consumers? We have advertising standards bodies that are meant to prevent this kind of thing in every other form of advertising, but somehow the internet is "special"?
Basic incentives - until they're fixed nothing will change.
Or they would be forced to seek agreements with ad networks to cover such faults. Insurance, in some form.
Isn't that what google did when facing the need to monetize their search engine ?
So effectively what you're saying is that we should eliminate ad networks. There is no reasonable way to screen every ad before it is shown when using an ad network. So in order to be safe from lawsuits, publishers would have to go back to directly contracting with advertisers for every ad. Certainly there would be some benefits to that in terms of reduced low quality ads. The problem is, the added overhead of doing so would put many small publishers out of business. Dealing with individual advertisers is a huge job, with massive economies of scale; it just doesn't make sense for websites that are orders of magnitude smaller than Forbes and Yahoo.