He says ad blockers are part of the problem, and yet he's effectively doing ad-blocking on his end too. Ad blockers prevent the kind of stuff he doesn't like from getting in on the client side, he's manually rejected them on the server side. Notice that his "sponsorship" banners are not going to be blocked by ad blockers.

There are two fundamental problems that gave rise to the ad networks: 1) Scale - nobody wants to have humans involved in bringing in ads. and 2) Fraud - Nobody wants to pay for ads that aren't actually seen by a human, this has even escalated to "clicked by a human".

I worked briefly for a company that did auditing of print and television ads. The agents (I'm not sure the correct term) would arrange for an ad to run in the paper, on TV, or whatever. Money would be set aside in an escrow for that ad and one of this companies people would verify that the ad ran before the money could go through. The whole business seems to be base on a lack of trust. The ad-man might try to divert funds from his ad budget to somewhere else, the paper or TV station might collect money and never run the ad. You could say it was all just "verification" but it's based on distrust.

One step toward relieving ad fraud on the internet is to eliminate anonymity by default so you'd know where clicks are coming from for example (I'm still in favor of anonymization in many cases, but you'd know it's in effect).