(pure speculation follows, I do not work in the ad industry)
Lets say I run a website lets say youtube.com or whatever.
I want to serve ads. I have to go to a marketplace like double click where advertisers bid for ads. In an ideal world, the client web browser will never talk to double click. When I serve a website, I will also serve the advertising myself from my own web servers using just html and css (no javascript). We can do a lot of flashy things using css animations so it shouldn't be a problem. If I really want my users to go away, maybe I can even serve video ads. I will simply get the ads from the marketplace and tell them I served an ad. However, reality is not that simple. If they let me do that, then I will have strong incentives to just lie. I probably won't do it for a while but after a bit the temptation to lie just becomes too great. Of course, I had twenty trillion page views yesterday. Why not? I am not saying youtube.com lies (and it would be trivial for Google to check if they did because they own YouTube). I am confident Google is probably the most upstanding member of the prominent players in the ad game. However, how can an advertiser trust some random website? I don't think advertisers will trust them.
This is a nonstarter because it doesn’t solve the media measurement problem.
Everyone in the advertising value chain has a financial incentive to run their own metrics. Nobody trusts anyone else’s metrics; and publishers will overstate viewership and advertisers will understate impressions. Nobody can even agree on a standard set of metrics for measuring the success of an ad.
That’s why all sorts of JavaScript tracking and analytics get included in online media properties. It’s called the “measurement problem” and it is far from a new problem in media. It’s one of those rare situations where incentives are so opposed that both parties have no reason to pretend they’re not screwing the other.
Edit: also, every decently large publisher will have its own ad standards as to what you can and cannot include, sizing, etc. usually you just work with an ad buyer and a creative firm to identify publishers to target, what keywords to aim for and design the ads for the format at each publisher. And most serious publishers will only serve ads hosted directly on their servers or a set of approved CDNs/DSPs.
Edit2: also there are mature formats for this stuff already like VAST, etc. they all include JavaScript and flash.
> And most serious publishers will only serve ads hosted directly on their servers or a set of approved CDNs/DSPs.
If the ads are hosted on my own servers, all is good.
I don't know YouTube or how its leadership thinks about these things but if I were in charge, I would go bankrupt before I allowed WPP to insert their arbitrary code on YouTube website and apps.
Point is that we have to put our foot on the ground and tell advertisers that they have to trust us. If that means publishers get paid less per "impression", I would be ok with it. This just seems like common sense to me because advertisers had to simply trust publishers when it came to print journalism. I think we need something to level the playing field so advertisers cannot compel publishers (or exchanges if we can sort of merge the publisher and the exchange) to give up their crown jewels.
Lets say I run a website lets say youtube.com or whatever.
I want to serve ads. I have to go to a marketplace like double click where advertisers bid for ads. In an ideal world, the client web browser will never talk to double click. When I serve a website, I will also serve the advertising myself from my own web servers using just html and css (no javascript). We can do a lot of flashy things using css animations so it shouldn't be a problem. If I really want my users to go away, maybe I can even serve video ads. I will simply get the ads from the marketplace and tell them I served an ad. However, reality is not that simple. If they let me do that, then I will have strong incentives to just lie. I probably won't do it for a while but after a bit the temptation to lie just becomes too great. Of course, I had twenty trillion page views yesterday. Why not? I am not saying youtube.com lies (and it would be trivial for Google to check if they did because they own YouTube). I am confident Google is probably the most upstanding member of the prominent players in the ad game. However, how can an advertiser trust some random website? I don't think advertisers will trust them.
I think we can get rid of a lot of problems in advertising by simply prohibiting any kind of javascript in advertisements. I don't know how though. https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js for example take a look at a more benign website https://i.imgur.com/KS3gjMV.png and compare it to this website https://news.ycombinator.com what if we could get rid of all the calls to third party servers?
Thoughts?