You've a contradiction in your statement. If I get a positive ROI tomorrow on those $50k, it's fine on paper. But if it turns out that a large chunk of the ad spend went to fraudsters without me having any idea it did, such as what happened with P&G [1], what's to stop the latter from doubling down on their activities? (The real losers here are genuine publishers like news outfits, btw.) And how do I know it's the $50k ad spend rather than what the content team has been up to in the past month? Or that the $50k wouldn't have been better spent on SEO efforts or on PR outreach?

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-procter-gamble-advertisin...

I don't understand what you are saying.

Say you sell lamps. If you spend $5000 next month on digital ads and you are able to attribute new sales of $6000 to that ad campaign, then why do you care what the impression numbers were? All that matters is that sales went up by a big enough amount.

The company selling ads can't tell you how effective the ads were. Only you know that.

Here's a more concrete and practical example: If you spend $50k on content marketing and SEO, and another $50k on ads, which is giving you the best bang for your buck?

In the current JS-based ad world you can go: my ROI on the first is X with reasonable confidence; and on the second I believe it is Y after discounting for [heaps of ad fraud-related reasons] -- which is not great, but still better than no idea.

In a text/image only ad world you'd go: my ROI on the first is X with reasonable confidence; on the second I've absolutely no idea except that the numbers are getting worst by the month because of [heap of ad fraud related reasons].

The main victim here, I should point out in passing, are the websites you're getting your news from.

And yes, you're somewhat correct, the company selling ads can't tell you how effective the ads ultimately are. But only they can tell you if the ad likely got served to an actual human rather than to a bot, among other schemes. And knowing that a bot is likely browsing your site can make a world of difference with your boss when you're reporting on whether you should spend more on content/SEO or online ads, or with your payment provider when someone is testing stolen CCs on your SaaS sign-up form.

> The main victim here, I should point out in passing, are the websites you're getting your news from.

The main victim is the user. We are tracked and profiled a million different ways. Shitty ad-tech devours our bandwidth and batteries and makes everything feel worse. I'd wager that end users are often paying more for the bandwidth and power to receive an ad than the publisher is getting paid to show the ad.