The advertising industry has been living a lie

I always figured we should put advertising on the currency of exchange... seriously, just put what ever picture you want on an individual dollar bill (or a $10/$20/$50/$100) for a price you pay to the Treasury for printing it in volume. Different markets for different denominations and you could actually even target specific areas based on the Atlanta vs Frisco printing locations. The price of ads on a dollar bill could easily exceed the value of the currency itself, because of the multiple transactions (even if it's only in circulation for 21 months!) People would even buy them as collectors taking the rare ones out of circulation.

Now, of course you could put advertising on your dynamic (image updating) credit card so as you pull it out at the grocery store it reminds to get more SnackyPoofs for your lovely little Cartman at home. Or perhaps we'll be putting advertising on the blockchain so that they will mine, and we can get transaction costs down!

I think the point that the article is trying to make is a lot less dramatic than the title would suggest.

Basically, there has been a long standing assumption that, netizens in general spend their time on a plethora of websites, and that instead of spending money on specific sites, one should spend money on audiences. In other words, advertise in accordance with a person's interests.

However, due to recent exploitation of this assumption by other fake sites, and fake bot-generated visitors, this assumption has met some strong evidence that would disprove it.

Could the advertisers simply get together and black list such advertising agencies that sell fake niche sites with fake bot-generated views? Or is that a naive view of things?

I find most of the claims in this (obviously PR driven) piece misleading.

Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Advertisers measure ROI, don't bother much to dig into which form/shape fraud takes place, the tech details, or how to identify or stop it. Because that's technically far from trivial. It's like a restaurant assuming 15% loss on fresh supplies. You factor that in and as long as you have a margin you're good to go.

What a terribly frustrating article.

1. It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense. (I'd argue that a deeper problem is that most simple online ads just don't work, for most people. And otherwise, if you're actually susceptible to online advertising, then actually getting served ads tightly targeted to your interests does make sense.)

2. I'm not sure that the data used (in support) supports the author's case that people stick to a small number of their favourite websites; rather, it looks like it shows that popular websites are popular. (Hard to be certain without examining the market research questions though.)

3. It then takes a tangent to show that lots of ad exchanges are unreliable; this may indeed be true, but is totally unrelated to the original premise.

The main issue is fraud detection. Having many different bills would confuse people, and you'd have hard time explaining which part of the bill you need to check and which part you don't. You're going to have the equivalent of fake download buttons.