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"Serve your advertisements from your own servers and if I want to read your content I have to make a choice whether to trust you and your webserver(s)."

Unfortunately, the advertiser then has to trust the publisher on how many users visited the site (or come up with something less intrusive that counts views).

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Absolutely.

Amazingly this trust has worked well enough for television and radio (and its advertisers) for decades.

No, the advertisers in radio and tv are in the same boat as the stations themselves... no one really knows how many people really saw/heard an ad. They just both choose to trust a third party (neilson/arbitron) to give them the ratings. It just isn't possible to know for sure how many people saw an ad from a broadcast. Cable/sat and DVRs make it a bit easier, but only a bit.

On the web though, it's ridiculously easy to verify each request that there is no need for the trusted third party.

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