If ads were served by the publisher than the advertiser would always think that the publisher was cheating and claiming they showed more impressions and generated more clicks.
If ads were server by the advertiser then the publisher would always think that the advertiser was cheating and claiming that they showed fewer impressions and got fewer clicks.
Both could believe that a third party is honest. Both will feel even more assured if the site has 50 different trackers from 50 different third parties tracking the process.
The topic of "accurate metric" is also challenging. When I worked on this, I would often find discrepancies of up to 5% depending on the technical implementation of the metric. There was never a clear explanation, just that the sequence of events from mouseover to click to redirect to more redirects to the final landing looked more like a very wide funnel with leaky correlation than the straight pipeline you might naively assume.
For instance Google has a blocker for "annoying ads" in Chrome. Needless to say it is never going to block an annoying ad that is served by Google. The whole thing is asking for a lawsuit.
If Google is aggressive against adblockers it similarly becomes a target in a way it would be if there were 4 major players that each got 20% of the market and then a bunch of small players.
The most interesting thing happening in online advertising today is the pitch made by the video or podcast creator that is embedded in the content. I've got an emotional connection with Nate Silver or Ana Psychology that makes me more responsive to their pitch than the average pre-roll.
Harder to block, so I manually skip it...
This way stupid clients just follow the domain and think it's subdomain.publisher.tld and dont care about the CNAME pointer to the advertising tracker.
And you've assumed correctly: This is a cat and mouse game, and if you take a closer look at all those adblocker lists you'll identify lots and lots of randomized subdomains that are there just for the purpose of temporary obfuscation.
Of course, why do advertising companies spend so much effort and resources to force ads in people's faces in TV/billboards/mobile games/unblocked web? I suppose those advertisements actually net the company back revenue. But trying to send advertisements to someone who has uBlock and PiHole, VPN, etc. is not only extremely difficult, but basically useless.
I think it boils down to the fact that the ads are delivered with the content. You can just choose to not look at the ads, right? This is the same principle that the ad blockers work on.
To get around that, Another way to do it is to deliver the ads first, have the browser attest the ads were played and then serve the content. The problem is the end user can always modify what you serve them. Getting the browser to attest to something like that is very hard if not impossible.
There's no good way to do it. The advertisers will always be playing a game of cat and mouse. They take what they can get, because that's all they can do.
This blog drives me up the wall with ads that cover the content, particularly on mobile devices
The buttons for closing the content are hard enough to hit on a touch screen that at least 50% of the time I am going to wind up clicking on the ad by accident. I don't want to reward that behavior so I don't attempt to close the ads.
It's a certain sign that Scientology is a shadow of what it used to be that David Miscavige hasn't unleashed his flying monkeys to make accusations of click fraud against that site. Maybe they just aren't as internet saavy as Heaven's Gate.
Yes, you are wrong. If it can be served (regardless of from where), it can be blocked.