I'd just like to add that almost all the problems with malicious ads are caused by ad networks that are used as "backfills" for when the in-house ads aren't booked. Backfilled ads are not inspected and can contain everything, but they are also needed because otherwise you'll have unsold inventory.
When we don't have a big sponsor for a section of our site, or haven't had enough direct sales for certain placements, it goes out to the ad exchange to action the spot off. That's where the problem is. That's somewhere we could start enforcing certain quality.
Ad exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB) are only causing a problem for people working in the media space because on the one hand if you don't have them you lose money, but on the other hand it's like gambling in regards to the quality of ads that will be served.
If I was buying a box of cereal, "we couldn't source enough reputable corn, so we topped it with melamine" would be the death of that cereal, for me.
(And yes, this is buyers at the cereal company instead of ad sellers, but it's the same: the hypothetical cereal company was not able to "sell" enough of its money to corn suppliers.)
Of course the goal is to operate at 100% efficiency, but in reality that's not going to happen all the time. Backfill channels like this are a way to make at least a little bit of money when sales a slow for a bit for whatever reason.
In terms of the problems the online media industry faces with advertising, the efficiency of in-house sales teams is not a huge priority atm.
If part of your pitch is that you avoid adblockers, then once you get big enough you'll constantly be fighting an uphill battle.
Obviously in execution it would be different, but I hope you get the idea.
Edit: I think self-served ad platforms are one way forward, but it depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Problems with self hosting:
- It's super duper hard to change the status quo. For them, the current solution 'works fine', once they fight the supposed evil that ad blockers are. Trust me, I fight for this sort of stuff and they just don't understand things the way we do.
- You can't do as much or sell ads for as much. You can charge more if you know more data about your visitors and can sell the ads to clients under the impression that it'll reach the exact demographic they're looking for.
- For some companies, it's already too much of a chore to have an in-house dev team to manage the content website. Have to have _people_ manage all these self hosted ads is not appealing to these companies. Very similar to AWS vs self-hosting
- An image is less interactive, so you can't sell it for as much. Those big fancy ads that are interactive are sold more many many more times the price as just a single jpg more.
- If you're 'lucky' to work in a media org big enough to have a sales team, even they don't sell out every single ad placement all the time - there's a big tailed on these states they still want to monetise and ad networks helps them do that.
That aside, things are changing. Everything on our site happens over HTTPS, which is a plus. We do win 'arguments' to move things in-house and not served from an ads network, where appropriate. We have an in-house 'studio team' who creates custom campaigns and creatives for clients, and they're almost entirely self hosted.