I think the analogy here with Wall St is apples and oranges. In Wall st, the security traded is fungible. Here in the ad world, an ad view could be high quality or lower quality. It could be a bot or a human looking to buy something. I am an engineer who spent 12 years in the ad tech industry. This problem is especially acute in the online video ad side where dollars are exchanged based on views and CPMs, not someone…
In my mind there's only two things that will really change this...better viewability/inventory auditing and attribution technology.
The larger, more reputable inventory sources (Google, FB, etc.) have a VERY vested interest in pushing quality and using whatever data they can bring to the table to build that trust, and then use that trust as a moat against their competition. Viewability providers likewise have an easy sell once they can improve the accuracy and reliability of their offerings (they have a long ways to go based on general sentiment in the industry). This will put pressure on other pubs to up their game or be left out. Why bother with a crappy news site that has 50%+ bot views that you're being billed for if FB or Google can prove that their traffic quality is much higher, better targeted, and infinitely higher reach?
On the buy side, the pressure will come in the form of attribution. Right now, display performance, video in particular, is a super murky area in terms of measuring success. What is the value of a view-through? Most advertisers couldn't tell you. And the ones that can probably have a very fuzzy picture of it that varies based on the attribution model they are using. However the space has improved dramatically, and at the end of the day, performance marketers will be able to do a much better job of telling whether traffic is crap or not based on whether it backs out. Bots don't buy things (although they do sometimes sign up for lead forms now). So if someone with a solid analytics stack sees a ton of impressions and no sales through their various attribution lenses, guess what? They'll stop buying those impressions. And the more big buyers that get smart about attribution and stop buying based on impression counts, the more pressure will be exerted on the sell-side to clean up their game.
So while the problem is "self-correcting" in the sense that there is big money with very vested interests in solving for this, unfortunately it is a big ship to turn and will take time.
Articles that talk crap about the ad industry rarely get into the nuances which is horribly infuriating and does a lot to give the industry a bad reputation. Like any space, there are bad players. Legit players in this industry want the bots and garbage out of the picture yesterday. They make our jobs harder, and reduce our performance.