Ad Networks and Publishers

what if the ad network has an incentive to not do it?

I imagine that's only because FB/Google want to protect their distribution, and users run ads directly with them. Smaller publishers have no choice but to give it all up to the ad networks

Because the ad networks don't completely trust the publishers.

Why is it up to the advertisers and publishers?

I don't think it's very surprising. Advertisers won't let publishers serve ads directly because that requires trust in publishers to not misrepresent stats like impressions and real views. I don't know how you'd solve that trust problem when publishers are actually incentivized to cheat advertisers.

Google doesn't have to replace publisher's ads with their own. They could just replace them with ads going through their market.

The advertisers are "losing" money but the middlemen (ad networks, publishers etc) are making money. So no, they'll never stop.

Most publishers (like the long-tail) cant sell or moderate every single ad. No advertiser these days picks a single site to run on, rather they purchase based on audiences.Instead, publishers will blacklist certain advertisers but for the most part it's very automated based on context, behavior targeting, and other factors. Also even if a publisher is large enough to do direct deals, they still use the networks to "backfill" the remaining inventory because they would rather mak

I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products.Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location a

Also a way of sticking it to web publishers who collect roughly 70% of the money from google-placed ads and 100% of direct ads