[stemuk]

I believe one essential step in the right direction would be to create an ad platform that allows companies to create and developers to show truly passive ads. To specify what I mean: Display a jpeg with the advertisement and link it to a website using a referral ID in the URL. This referral ID would obviously only be a vague indicator of success, but I believe that even though targeted advertising might be more effective, there is a market for 'universal advertising' (for commodities most people use like toothpaste, cars or breakfast cereal).

The revenue model might be slightly different from platforms like AdSense, where instead of paying per 1M impressions you would maybe choose a newspaper like model where the advertiser pays a fixed price depending on the property that displays the ad.

And the cherry on top: All of this would be GDPR compliant right out of the box, so no hour-long fiddling with the ToS agreement.

[stevesearer]

While not a platform, my site sells and hosts our own advertisements which are only static images and are sold per month. We've been doing this for the last 5 years or so and it seems to work well for our advertisers.

Selling advertisements based on impressions incentivizes publishers to maximize impressions through various means such as click-bait titles, auto-refreshing ads while you're on the page, or implementing slideshows. All of these things degrade a website's experience in the long-term for the sake of ekeing out a few more dollars in the short term.

[AlexandrB]

This has already been done and failed: http://decknetwork.net/