I think it will be a good change if publishers were forced to sell/deliver their own ads. The problem has always been third-party ad networks that track you across the web and sometimes delivers malware. Publishers have never had to take ownership for the ads they serve and the user experience has suffered.
The way forward is native ads (no, native ads aren't advertorials) like podcast ads, radio ads, or sponsored posts on individual blogs like Daring Fireball.
The problem is with publishers too small to individually attract the attention of advertisers... which is most of the ones that use advertising to begin with. Any way to solve that problem reintroduces an ad network in some form or another.
Or would you say that advertising is only for big shots, and small-time publishers should just rely on up-front payment?
It's possible to have ad networks, but for publishers to host the software themselves. This would eliminate the tracking and cookies that follow you from site to site.
Third party ad networks should pivot and provide a single binary executable (e.g. Go/Rust/C++ application) that a website owner adds to his website. And that binary app delivers the ads from the ad network and the website can choose how he integrates it to the website. The ad network will receive a list of URLs from the binary where it checks (with different IPs) if the ad is displayed to the user and if the image file hash is the same. Such an ad would be good for the users privacy (no more third party JS), good for the website owner (more ads delivered, more money), and good for the ad network (ads delivered also to users with adblockers) - a win-win-win situation.
Even with all that data, ad networks have massive problems with click fraud. Now you want them to discard all that and even pay the website owners according to their self reported visitor numbers? Good Luck with that.
How is a binary blob self reported? It can be signed and is totally in control of the ad network, just runs on the actual website. And click fraud wouldn't even exist if the ad network would pay per page impression/view. And ad networks will have to adapt in some way anyway for iOS9.
The Question is how does the website owner prove real organic impressions to the Advertiser? If people can buy ad clicks, they also can buy fraudulent ad impressions. A manipulated reverse proxy could also simulate fake impressions.
What could work is if cloudflare becomes an ad network and injects advertising into your site.
even big publishers like Yahoo can't do that because there's an average of 20 companies between then and the brands advertising. publisher would love to be alone in the field and pocket the .20 per click. but ad agencies go a long way to doubt the publisher reports etc and try to pay less.
every month a new layer show up, with the sole promise of allowing the ad vendor to pay less for the publisher. the fad du jour is viewable.
The way forward is native ads (no, native ads aren't advertorials) like podcast ads, radio ads, or sponsored posts on individual blogs like Daring Fireball.