There's no way to prove that you've served a particular number of ads to real humans. That's why all these ridiculous brokers and third-party fragments of javascript exist: it would otherwise be trivial for the publisher to defraud the advertiser.
This means no tracking, which in turn means the advertiser has to trust the publisher completely.
This is entirely possible - it's however not going to work through an opaque network of auctions. The publisher will have to sell the advertising space to advertisers themselves, just like print and TV, and trust the impression statistics, just like print and TV. Advertisers can't just drop $10k at the doorstep of some as network and sit back and expect statistics. They will have to drop more money, and spend even more on the surveys they have to perform to figure out whether their advertising is working.
This would be the death of the "online ad industry" as we know it, and also the death of large parts of the web as we know it. I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.
Ideally for advertiser would be to pay per conversion, but then we need to defraud the other side.
Is this the case? I've seen absolutely tonnes of blatantly paid-for content across the web, and if anything there seems to be much more than there ever was.
The ASA rules are pretty tight. The user has to know something is paid for content before clicking. So a YouTuber putting out a sponsored video needs to include something in the title of the video, and the link, saying "sponsored content". A banner at the start of the video isn't enough.
eg, if you complain about an advert from a Canadian firm the ASA will refer it to the appropriate national agency for you. My limited understanding is this is reciprocal for residents of those nations too.
The rules are being flouted wholesale, yet many nations have an ASA that could do something about it.
[1] http://www.easa-alliance.org/
[2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Working-with-others/Cross-b...
The ASA is generally likely to consider terms such as “sponsored content” as referring to a traditional sponsorship relationship, where material has been financially sponsored but over which the creator retains editorial control. Sponsorship of this kind is not covered by the CAP Code.
Using such terms to describe an ad feature is unlikely to be acceptable. Following an ASA challenge, the ASA ruled against an ad that was included in a “sponsored section” of a website and labelled as “in association with”, considering that the labels in themselves did not make clear the commercial nature of the content
There was a lot of consolidation. But they're still around. They're basically that opaque network of algorithmic auctions you mentionned, in fact. If they can't display one of their direct clients' ads, they sell the spot to the highest bidder.
I found you could also choose more different formats. OK, there was no video (thank God), but you could have unobtrusive text links, you could have banners, little buttons, HTML blocks, and so on. And yes, also annoying pop-ups and flash ads...
You also had paid content, which is absolutely taboo and vilified today, but I believe it was not nearly as bad as we think. It was certainly better than some alternatives (horrible pop-up-ads that installed dialers, does anybody remember them?) Back then, I was proud to not serve evil or annoying ads, and to promote articles from partners on my site - including setting links to them to promote their page ranks. (That Google shows links among search results that they get money for, but forbids slightly improving the position of search results when other people got money for it tells a lot IMHO.)
One alternative to the current situation would be for sites to serve their own ads (from their own servers). I wonder why this isn't done at least from big sites?