Stop calling them ad blockers. They block surveillance features that advertisers put in their ads. I do not believe that ads would be blocked by surveillance blockers if they were just ads. Absent the surveillance, how would they recognize them?
If ads were identical to the ads in analogue newspapers then surveillance blockers would let them through. When I read an analogue newspaper or magazine nobody is knowing if I read the ads or not. They only know whether they get results from advertising in that outlet. And they know that by tracking.
They could run ads that don't spy on people.
I always use surveillance blockers. I never shut them down for anybody.
It is especially offensive when sites that are hardcopy outfits which have gone digital to keep up with the times complain about surveillance blockers. They certainly know how to run ads that are just ads. There is no technical difference between the ads and the rest of the page. The layout is the thing. They have experience with this and professional advertising people know about tracking results.
Sure, they block surveillance features, and that's definitely a reason why a lot of people use them. But people would still use adblockers with traditional, static ads, because they detract from the look of the page on a visual level and use up extra bandwidth on top of that.
Ad blockers dont block ads. They arent even "ad" blockers but just filters - browser extensions that block anything on a page from loading if its coming from a blacklisted domain. Whether it's ads, trackers, social widgets or just an image - it gets blocked by canceling the network request.
Surveillance is not the leading cause for adblock, it's because people don't like ads and a 1-click install to remove them is incredibly easy.
Advertising online will always have some sort of tracking because that is the benefit of advertising online - to know the real metrics of who has seen and clicked and engaged with an ad. If you're worried about real privacy issues, you should focus on Facebook/Google and government agencies.
I don't use facebook or google. I use startpage a a google proxy on rare occasions, but mostly search with ixquick. My representatives know what I think about government surveillance and privacy issues, for what its worth.
I agree and disagree about online ads always having interactive features. It makes sense, but the controversy around this does make for the possibility that some will go for straight ads. For me surveillance is the main reason I use blockers. History shows that corporations are more of a threat than government. Hitler could never have made it absent the Krupp family. They put him in power. I don't know about Stalin. He did have help along the way, but since he ruled till he died there is a lot less information available, and it is spotty at best. Of course in America the corporations run the government, and it isn't just from campaign contributions, though at this time that is the biggest thing. Europe to. Most of the world's governments are run by corporations behind the scenes.
The big possibility to force ads to be non interactive is to seriously call newspapers and magazines that predate the internet on this. I do this pretty regularly. An ad that does not have any interactivity cannot be filtered without removing the article one is reading. That is easy to do. And the incredible amount of publicity waiting for the first newspaper or magazine to require advertisers to eliminate interactive ads should be really tempting. If their publicity department doesn't see this they need to hire me! Given the resources that publicity outfits have I could get the ball rolling and keep it going for long enough that it would be remembered for a while after the boom. The only thing to filter would be the graphics. Alt text would deal with this. If on has use of the advertised item(s), one will check out the pictures. However, I noticed when I "upgraded" my firefox that they don't have the option to block images in the new version, or at least they make it difficult by completely removing the tool bar that held that function. I've looked and looked, but not found.
In any event, I utterly lack sympathy for interactive advertisers and the websites that allow them. I'll happily do without them as they go out of business, and I hope they do!
AFAIK, and what it looks like from Adblocks FAQ [1] they work by blocking particular addresses from serving content. I assume surveillance blockers do what you are describing and it sounds like a move away from ad blockers to surveillance blockers might make the web more usable and sustainable.
Adblock plus is on the way out, the new kid in town is µblock origin.
The difference ?
Adblock plus can be extended to block trackers by adding block lists to the default, while ublock origin has those lists activated by default.
Then adblock plus let through some ads they whitelist for money and supposedly good behavior, ublock origin has no such policy for the reason that ublock is the work of an individual who wants a better online experience while adblock plus is now the product of a commercial company.
That may be true of the general HN crowd, but I doubt it's true for most people. I block ads because they make the web ugly and slow. It's simply nicer to browse sites without them.
In my case at least, "surveillance" doesn't factor into it. If I were to see ads, I'd actually prefer they be targeted to my interests.
Right now (and without ad blockers):
Go to homedepot.com, search for toilets, and view one toilet product page. This marks your interest. facebook.com will show you ads for toilets for the next month.
Well, I don't have a Facebook account so I can't test the experiment. But generally if I search for something I don't mind seeing related ads for that thing. Especially if it's something that suits my interests. Google for instance lets you edit your interests list.
I don't give a FF, I want to minimize the information strangers have about me. I'd rather see ads that were not targeted. If they know about me that is bad, regardless of all else. Who doesn't matter. Why doesn't matter. I've never had a checking account or credit card. My bank knows nothing of how I spend my money. For mail order I use money orders and aliases. When I contact online sellers I use an alias which I delete shortly after receiving whatever and telling them that it came. I consider surveillance unpatriotic. I may not be able to prevent the NSA from knowing all, but I make purchases anonymously unless I am at a brick and mortar store.
"By converting unsafe flash-based ads to safe HTML5 ads, they lower the risk of infection from a hostile ad." is laughable at best
An Ad Network is one of the fastest way to deliver a payload to a lot of users
Don't fool yourself, Operating Systems, Browsers and HTML5/JS also have a hell lot of CVE that can be exploited
It's funny how a company like Google making Billions from ads, having ton of smart engineers, have never figured out during the last decade how to "scan ads for malware".
It's not like anyone can upload an ad to those big network, or that they don't QA the ads before delivering them ...
Imagine this unlikely scenario: malware delivered by HTML5/JS
I guess we'll all have to run for the hills if that happen
Truth hurts? Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are common exploit paths because they have new critical exploits every few days. Here's the CVE list for Flash -- notice how many critical exploits there are? It averages to about 1 every 3 days.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...
If you know otherwise, then please cite the specific CVEs. Otherwise, you're just spreading false information. You wrote, "Browsers and HTML5/JS also have a hell lot of CVE that can be exploited". I say: Prove it. Cite your sources.
that explains why you will never see a specific HTML and/or JS CVE, that does not mean they don't exists.
Also in term of volume, browsers have more CVE than Flash, it's all here in the numbers: Firefox 1320, Chrome 1216, but no let's ignore them and focus on Flash 713 CVE.
Just that it make your whole argument biased, the part "JavaScript itself has been pretty stable for years" is ridiculous, search for JS blackhole exploit, Rowhammer.js exploit, Heap Overflow exploit in JS, etc. you don't see them in CVE but they are here and exploitable.
that's 1 patch, it does not indicate 1 CVE every 3 days, look at the details
"These updates resolve use-after-free vulnerabilities that could lead to code execution (CVE-2015-8050, ..." that's more than 50 CVE of the same type patched
and closed at the same time
Also look the "Acknowledgments", numerous security team reported all those CVE for them to be patched, there is no indications they were exploited in the wild.
Saying such things as "oh 30 CVE discovered in 1 month, so that means there were 1 CVE per day" is totally misleading, even more misleading to assume all those CVE were exploited by default (eg. "could lead to").
At best it indicates that they (Adobe and other security team) are more serious about discovering and patching those CVE and so they close more of them more often.
> It's funny how a company like Google making Billions from ads, having ton of smart engineers, have never figured out during the last decade how to "scan ads for malware".
Or a third way, everybody hides content behind paywall, hail the new web 3.0. Maybe not a bad thing, subscription could bring the old qualified journalism back the in the print era.
If you don't think anti ad blocker is a problem, where is this article coming from? Hmmm, afraid that more websites would follow the trend so less content to read? The attitude that this is only websites and advertisers' problem is not as constructive as the author might presume.
Yet the news sites demonstrate how utterly clueless they are with the amount they set their online subscriptions to.
£1 a day for The Times - very nearly the cost of the actual paper. $1 daily to access Wired. Don't make me laugh. No one consumes all their news from a single source any more.
If my usage pattern is anything near representative, 2-5p a day for the Times and .5p a day for Wired, based on how often I visit equivalent sites and how many stories I read whilst there.
Seems like unless it's something very specialised (medical journal or similar), or the FT charging as though it was our sole news source just demonstrates how out of touch they are.
Sure, charge me £1-£2 a day for consumption, but that would have to be spread across 50-100 sites daily, some of which I've visited just once in the last year, for one article. AND, if I am going to be willing to be micro-charged I want a way to NOT pay a specific site (perhaps I visited and the content was poor). Make that happen I'll subscribe today.
Ask me for £1 for your shitty site daily and you'll wait forever, but good luck with your greed - that's what caused the adpocalypse in the first place.
Hmmm, so you now understand advertising is not a evil business really, right?
It is effectively a way to price the information, how much should be paid for your view. Note in print days, you still pay your subscription, yet you get shit loads of ads. And you have a variety choices of publishers.
So why this is the worst model ever?
The article is laughable that it gives no solution, but asks publishers to evolve into oblivion, which I think they won't.
Some people are so pissed that publisher got anti ad blocker in place, yet claim they won't pay to their shitty articles whatsoever. But then again, if you don't read those shitty articles that much, why are you so pissed in the first place?
After all you need to pay what you consume, and ad is one way of it. It is not perfect, nor evil. Your call then.
Well I would agree, but ahem popups, popunders, sound, retargeting, tracking, simulated download buttons, simulated anti-virus messages, animations, sound, maximise on rollover, sound (sound there multiple times intentionally :p)
Now then, an industry that resorts to every underhand trick they can think of is not doing much to have my sympathy.
If I could visit a site with ADS, and just ads, without any tracking, retargeting or other trickery I'd gladly have the ads for that site on permanently. By the same token I wouldn't even mind seeing ads on the sites I actually paid for if they were locally hosted and tracking free.
> Note in print days, you still pay your subscription, yet you get shit loads of ads
How many print ads had sound, retargeting, tracking or dropped malware? Comparing apples and oranges here.
Oh no, just to make the internet usable I need to block >50% of the domains a page tries to load. So to turn on ads I need to figure out which of the 20 blocked domains and 10 blocked scripts will let ads through. But tracking and retargeting gets enabled when you do that. Fuck that.
> Some people are so pissed that publisher got anti ad blocker in place .... if you don't read those shitty articles that much, why are you so pissed in the first place?
I'm not pissed about the anti ad-block. I'm pissed because the sites show up when I'm searching in the first place. I'm pissed because I go to the site thinking I can get the information I was teased with in my search only to find out I've been tricked. I'm forced to do something (unblock the ads), accept some fake implicit agreement (you agree to look at our ads), and be spied on (all the trackers) before I can get to the content I was lead to believe was there.
The fix is to remove all blocked content from the search so we won't even know it exists in the first place. We won't get upset, we won't get blocked, the sites won't get content "stolen" by those who won't view or click the ads to being with. Everybody's happy. Win Win.
I think anexprogrammer meant that literally: "Charge me 1-2£ per day and give me some choice where the money goes". I have paid for online content, and have considered it often for content creators that I like. You can get movies and music for a low monthly fee, why not articles? Hello business model!?
The way we consume media has changed. 20 years ago I'd have a daily newspaper to read on the commute and subscribe to a few magazines - say 5 a month.
In today's terms a spend of perhaps £1.50 a day for media.
Now I'll read 5 articles on the Guardian, 5 on Ars, 1 on Wired, 2 on the register, 1 on the Telegraph, 1 on NYT, another on The Atlantic etc, etc. Tomorrow will be a different selection. If I bought subscriptions as they are typically set online I'd be spending £30 or something a DAY on media. That's ridiculous.
So yes, there needs to be a better micro payments model for media consumption. I'd happily pay. The Google way of doing it is closest thus far, but doesn't give me any control of who gets paid. eg I'm not happy with a percentage of my micro spend going to the clickbaity upworthy article I clicked and bounced straight off.
"Evil" is a ridiculous word to use in the first place; but for what it's worth, in my opinion, a platitude like "[ads are] not perfect, nor evil," glosses over the fact that ads often are vectors for attacks that rely on deception, ignorance, and unwitting surveillance, which definitely has an ugly moral flavor. The business model may not be inherently evil (what is?), but it sure seems to be a convenient technology for deliberate abuse via fraud and malware.
And then the sites not set up for business reasons end up getting the lion's share of the traffic? Because for however many sites might add a paywall for pay for 'journalism', there's an equal number of sites run by people for fun/a side hobby that are willing to give it out for free.
That's always going to significantly limit paywalls online. Too much competition from hobbyists and non profits that see their goal as helping people rather than selling their work.
There really isnt any competition from "hobbyists/non-profits". The top publishers on the web all produce a ton of content, none of it can be run without a big business operation which has to earn something, either through advertising or paywalls.
Well, in the gaming scene, most of my news comes from social media sites, fan sites and fan run wikis, which don't tend to be run as businesses.
For example, if I want the latest information about Zelda U, I wouldn't go to IGN or Kotaku or Polygon, but instead to Zelda Informer, Dungeon or Wiki depending on what exactly I was looking for. If it was more general information, then that's what the likes of GoNintendo are for.
Of course, I could always just go to the company instead of a middleman; most of them are moving towards marketing straight to the consumer rather than the press. Given that most of say, IGN's information comes from summarising things like Nintendo Directs and E3 presentations, or from what's trending on Reddit or Twitter or Youtube, it seems more logical to go straight to the source than through the middleman.
Would this work in all fields? No, stuff that's dangerous or complex (like say, reporting on the war in Syria or what not) tends to need more professional organisations. But if you're after information on games, TV shows, movies, music, celebrity gossip or sports, then to some degree you can pretty much entirely replace the professional media with fan sites and blogs.
It's also why paywalls are going to be a problem even in the short term; anything factual you put behind one is going to end up on the fan run sites and aggregators anyway. If a big site puts something interesting up behind their paywall, then it'll be maybe about ten minutes before someone's ripped the whole thing, stuck it on sites like Youtube and its then been posted across the entire blogosphere.
Sure, but that's not really professionally produced content then. Wiki's and social sites are just users creating content for themselves, which is a fine system, although most wikis (especially the wikia network) is all financed through advertising anyway so it's the same thing.
Paywalled content is going to need to be more than facts, in fact if it's just facts then most news sources are overkill. Rather its the voice and other in-depth journalism that would demand a premium. In this case though there are pretty powerful copyright protection systems in place that it's not really a worry. The same reason why little youtube players complain about stolen videos but not the big studios.
"I think that we need to hold the web sites accountable for the content that they display. If browsers get infected by ads at Forbes or people buy knock-off watches from ads at Yahoo, then we need people to sue Forbes and Yahoo. Remember: these web sites authorized the placement of the ad on their web page."
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.
Lets look at other media and see if your conclusion is correct. Do TV networks vet, produce and handle the ad-client and ad-publisher relationship, or do they mainly interact through marketing firms? The answer: they work mainly through marketing firms. The TV network is still ultimately responsible for the content they broadcast, as dictated by law.
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.
Are you sure there aren't scams advertised in newspapers and on TV? The main reason you see more scams online though isn't (only) because of inferior vetting. It's mostly because online ads are much cheaper than TV, so the economics work out better for the scammers. Same reason you get more spam in your inbox than your mailbox. (And there are plenty of shady classified ads in newspapers. You probably don't see them because like most of us, you don't read newspapers.)
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.
In Sweden where i live, a TV station that would repeatably broadcast illegal ads would loose their license. They would not be allowed to use the radio frequencies, and would loose millions from such outcome. When government agency that deal with TV broadcast makes a decision, or the consumer protection agency (a other government branch), they do listen.
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.
> 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.
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!
Most of the good ad networks today (like Adsense) try very hard to do this already. The problem is that it's not easy. For instance, how do you stop a malicious advertiser from creating a legitimate looking ad that points to a legitimate looking page, then redirecting it to a different page after the ad is vetted? What if it only redirects for certain IP address ranges? And that's just one example of a technique a malicious advertiser could use. None of the top tier networks want malicious ads on their platforms. The problem is that it's difficult to remove them.
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.
Your proposed approach will stop direct risks to browsers, but does nothing for ads that link to web pages that are hostile. E.g., you click on an ad because you are interested in the product and get directed to a phishing site or a site offering counterfeit goods or a site that has malware and infects your browser.
It's not just the graphic used by the ad, it's also the ad's destination.
We solve all this by having a platform that syndicates sponsored content directly to the user. They click but stay on a rendered page controlled by us. No 3rd party assets or destination to worry about.
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"?
Our ad network does this. It works. The problem is that the larger global ad industry doesn't have much regulation or enforcement so it's very easy to run scams and nobody gets in trouble for it. The infrastructure players don't care since they make money on volume, not quality.
Basic incentives - until they're fixed nothing will change.
Right. I actually considered that when writing the post, then didn't end up mentioning it. I suppose that's possible, although I find it unlikely that large ad networks would indemnify small publishers in that way. Perhaps if they felt they had no alternative though.
> 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.
Isn't that what google did when facing the need to monetize their search engine ?
The publishers aren't very innocent themselves. Clickbait articles are nowadays not a dirty strategy to get ad views, but to be expected. Then you have the endemic tracking going on, the tracking that has become intertwined with viewing an ad. Being tracked and seeing an ad... it's the same thing! Nowhere else in the real world but on Internet is this to be expected. And it's a debate that is frustratingly only discussed in organizations like the EFF, never lifted to the general public.
The mafia comparison feels much more like a stretch when talking of ad blockers than when talking of the bulk of the world's news sites secretly (unless inspecting network traffic or HTML code) using a common few advertisement agencies.
I think the recent cookie laws feel pretty useless, especially since cookies aren't nasty by themselves. "Hi! This site uses cookies! Click here to learn more." It doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't imply that the site is evil nor good. However, give me a law requiring web sites to say "Hi! We are part of a tracking network where your behavior on this site will be registered." Then we're talking. Where the link doesn't lead to an explanation by the publisher, but be required to lead to a link on an external part with an easily digestible, up front explanation of what an ad tracker does and can do. I'm honestly quite fed up that this offensive behavior can keep going on behind the scenes. All people see are photos of a new car model. A normal ad that is anything but normal.
For as long as there is this World Wild West on the publishers' sides, I'm not going to change my behavior on defending myself. Because I look at this as a form of defense. It's simply like running antivirus tools on Windows. I wouldn't want a trojan horse to be downloaded that uploads my browsing behavior to some server either. The difference from what these guys are doing seems razor-thin.
It actually depends on the publisher, the french news site nextinpact[1] listen to criticism of ads, looked into the issues and made their move: ads are limited to display format, no behavioral targeting, no animation, no mixing content and ads, no tracker on client-side (tracking is on server side with a locally installed piwik).
The mafia comparison is targeting adblock plus for their "do your ads as we say, give us a 30% cut of the money you make and we may whitelist your ads (only if you're big enough as in at least 10m ad impressions)" feature[3].
Advertisers run ads on the internet precisely because of the richer metrics it offers - knowing exactly who/how many saw, clicked, or otherwise engaged with an ad. This makes advertising more efficient and better for both the advertiser and you the user.
The implementation is current broken largely due to a lack of regulation and enforcement in the industry but this can easily be fixed by having better opt-out mechanisms online (3rd party cookie removal went the opposite way). This would allow you to get more generic ads if that's your wish.
"But keep in mind: not everyone is Google, not ever web site has a huge amount of traffic. With online ads, payment is usually tied to the click-through rate (CTR). The CTR is typically around 1% (actual percentage varies by web site). So if 100 people visit your web page, then 1 person will probably click on the ad, generating a fraction of a cent. If each click pays $0.001, then you need 1000 clicks to earn $1. And if 1% of uses click, then that's about 100,000 visitors."
I'm not sure where these numbers come from, but unless you are in fact running a spam site, and likely even then, revenue per click is going to be higher than a fraction of a cent. As a random data point, it looks like the combined revenue per click from Adsense on our sites is around 30 cents per click at the moment.
Yes, much of the info in this article seems completely made up. The cheapest clicks in the entire industry are probably around 2-3c and these are the worst of the worst. Many are far higher, probably somewhere between 20-70c and going up to $$ depending on ad quality and conversion ROI.
I admit it, I look at linkbait articles and sites... The problem is that it's crossed a line that there are so many intruisive ads, that the web doesn't work without blockers.
If I happen to click on an article from facebook on my phone, the resulting page shouldn't be something I can't even scroll/read because it's so riddled with ads.
Another part is an extension of what TFA says... they should be held responsible... current techniques are iframes, and when a timeout occurs or it bounces to another ad network, another layer of iframe and tracking scripts runs... if an average ad is 3 layers of iframes, and an average page has 5-8 ads, that'd 15-24 complete extra browser contexts just for ads...
Just to throw out this idea I've been thinking about for a bit as a ad-golden-rule: The other end of an ad has to have an identifiable person attached (ideally a citizen or from a non-poor country): An ad-auditor.
So now the other end of the ad is not faceless/identiti-less. If the ad is found to serve malware, there's someone to ban/take action against (like banning from a good-paying ad-audit job for life). Ad-networks that require the golden rule can be white-listed by blockers, and become trusted. Networks that don't are considered malware haven.
Could this work? In the current ad-blocking war, the use of ad-blockers will only rise-and-rise, and something has got to give.
The problem right now is that it can often be difficult for anyone to tell where an ad ultimately came from. A user will complain to a publisher about a bad ad. So the publisher gets a description of the ad, maybe a url that it points to. The problem is the url goes through various redirects, so the one that the user ended up on isn't the one the ad points to, so it can't be searched. But a bigger problem is where to even search. The unit housing that ad will probably be served by multiple networks, with an algorithm deciding which to serve from based on how many ads that user has seen, where they're located, and various other criteria. Then if that network doesn't have a sufficiently valuable ad to serve, they will either farm it off to another network (and so on), or pass it back to the publisher's ad server, which will find another network to serve an ad there.
This all happens in real time. So the point is, when you get a report of a bad ad on your page, it's almost impossible to even know what network it came from. The networks themselves don't know if they ultimately served you the ad, because maybe they got it from someplace else. And no one can search for it based on the url anyway.
Now, none of those things is unsolvable, although it would take significant new regulation. For instance, when an ad is served through a network, there should be a standardized way to add metadata to the ad to state that it was served via that network. In cases where it is passed through several networks, it would carry each of their metadata, in order from the original source through the various levels until the network that actually serves the ad to the publisher. That would at least allow savvy users to make an informed report to a publisher when they get a bad ad.
Something else to look at might be requiring that either 1) the target url of an ad points directly to the eventual landing page, or 2) if a redirect is made, the original url be encoded either in the new url (as a fragment id perhaps) or at least as metadata in the page. There are probably plenty of caveats there. But if a user clicks on an ad and finds themselves at some page, there should be some way to figure out what ad took them there. That isn't currently the case.
Identifying the networks an ad has passed through would be the responsibility of those networks (with a standardized way of doing so). Avoiding or identifying redirects would be the responsibility of the advertisers, but networks would have to be required to periodically test ads for compliance.
With the ad-auditor idea, the model itself changes. The middlemen go away, and there's a person at the other end. Yes, the business of ads will change per this new model.
An analogy is financial-auditors -- a human has to be present and sign even if the report is for a company behind 10 shell companies.