That's still The condition for me to view ads: no third party servers, no third party JS.

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.

That's only 1 of many reasons. Another big one being it's a lot more time-consuming and costly to run your own ad sales team, you always have to worry about filling all ads in all countries, and the average CPMs you get may not be nearly as good as the ones without any headaches from big ad networks (well, headaches from the advertiser acquisition perspective).

How do physical newspapers prove ad serving to their buyers? I'm certain they don't point to every single newspaper thrown in a driveway.

Third parties and surveys e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_Verification_Counc...

Similar to Nielsen ratings for television, they're approximate.

So why can't the same be done on websites? If numbers of views can't be confirmed without spying on users or trusting shady actors to do that for you, it means the business model that is based on this metric is skewed.

If one network offers approximate numbers from an expensive external audit and another network offers "exact" tracking through cookies etc., which network do you think advertisers will spend with?

Exactly such egoistic and short term thinking led us to the current situation and the widespread usage of ad-blockers, no?

In general, newspapers serve the same ads to all their users, so approximate circulation roughly correlates to an ad's reach. Websites don't, so even if you knew a website's pageview count you would have no idea what percentage of those pageviews an ad appeared on.

And that, eventually, is going to have to be good enough for online publishers and advertisers.

How about pay-per-goal, instead of pay-per-click? I believe almost all advertisers don't like their conversion rates, and introduce things like pay-per-second-click, etc.

Ideally for advertiser would be to pay per conversion, but then we need to defraud the other side.

Sure there is; that's what DoubleClick for Publishers is for: https://www.google.com/dfp

This is a really fantastic solution in terms of functionality, but it also comes burdened with a bunch of JS calls and user profiling opportunities. It's very like Google Analytics in that respect; there's a quid pro quo if a publisher uses it.