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That does make sense and I hadn't thought of that. But considering the huge portion of internet users with adblock enabled, wouldn't it make sense for the advertiser, publisher and third party to collaborate on a system installed on the publisher's servers that the third party verifies is an accurate metric? Or maybe the naysayers are correct that the whole ad tech universe could never and will never work and is doomed?

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Yup this is sometimes done, where the third party stuff is served out of a first party subdomain instead of a third party domain. It's still uncommon except in the big publishers because it requires more effort to do the integration.

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.

This exists, but is rare and only for larger players. At the end of the day, if the end user can identify the DOM slot the ad goes into, it gets blocked either way. It'll forever be a cat and mouse game.

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