[anilgulecha]

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.

[tempestn]

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.

[anilgulecha]

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.