[woud420]

1) Advertising

2) A lot. Publishers relying on clickbait to generate money. Advertisers creating invasive ads with autoplay sound and video. Ignoring do-not-track requests as part of the industry (even if some technology providers respect DNT, it seems like a lot don't). Malware. A lot of useless metrics. Bandwidth usage. Etc...

3) Micro-payments vs delivering content only when an ad has been seen? Validating content delivered through exchanges. A better way to anonymize data used for tracking? Smaller ads. Honestly, I'm not too sure, there's probably a lot that can be done but I feel the industry did too little too late.

[mxvzr]

5+ years of experience in adtech, on the advertisers' side mostly. By far the largest surprise for me was the amount of efforts that went into denying payouts to the publishers. That went anywhere from designing terms that reduces the likelihood of payouts to straight up fraud (ie. double accounting, scrubbing conversions, ...). Ultimately I think a lot has to do with greed: publishers simply expect too high of a payout for these clicks, and advertisers do not want to see the traffic go somewhere else so they align with these expectations. They are then caught in this unsustainable price war with competitors and resort to fraud to keep going. IMO the #1 issue with this industry is one of credibility.

[Mendenhall]

I always wonder if there is a way to directly (micro)pay people to watch the ads and cut out middle man so to speak.