It's strange that the most simple and elegant solution to ad-blocking, self hosted ads are not considered by anyone. Magazines and papers have always done this in print. Yes there is overhead, because you have to handle the content manually and it's hard, even tough not impossible to measure impressions. But with print it's always been this way and now the media industry wants to both have the cake and eat it, because they don't want to handle ads but they want the revenue.

And maybe I should clarify, how does self-hosted ads solve the problem?

- It's hard to block ads on the same domain as the main content.

- Just loading an image with an ad is not as much of an performance hit as javascript loaded tracking ads and thus should not annoy users as much.

- More secure, because you can not hack one single ad service and distribute mallware to thousands of sites. Besides, the solution is less complex, and complexity always leads to bad security.