[trprog]

>prospect buys your product/service- success!

I suspect tying payments to actual user actions, in particularly the user buying something, is the best solution. Affiliate marketing essentially. Its easy to verify and very tough to profitably game so the company running the ads can pay their ad network/publishers/marketing staff with confidence.

Ultimately the advertiser doesn't really care how many impressions (or whatever) they get. They care how many people buy their thing or take some specified action.

I suspect the big roadblock is that some ad networks, publishers and marketeers don't particularly want there to be a concrete ungameable metric that requires them to produce ads that actually move product. If you are counting views or clicks it is easier to look like you are succeeding than if you are only counting people who actually get their wallet out.

[ensignavenger]

They can still count clicks and views- you know if someone visited your site or not from an ad that uses a custom URL- so if that is what you want to measure, your don't need any JavaScript. If you find a publisher is sending you too much garbage (fake) traffic, you don't advertise with that publisher anymore. Thus it behooves the publisher to do fraud prevention on their end.