Re: The option i want...
From the client side, the "did we serve you our ads" checkers would have to run on the host site's script rather than third-party scripts (which can be blocked generally without harming the site's functionality), which would upend the whole web advertising paradigm. The host script would have to be aware of each and every ad being injected by one of the third party scripts in order to make sure it has been requested/served, and that's not something it would usually know.
As soon as you pass that "did you get my ad?" functionality off to a third-party script, it makes it blockable without completely breaking the site, generally. To avoid that, the checker for ads would have to be in a script that is necessary for the site to function, so that blocking the checking script breaks the whole page... but that could just lead the adblocker user to conclude the site's messed up and go elsewhere, so there's still no ad revenue.
When I find a site that fails to work with my ad and script blockers, I won't work very hard to get it functioning once again. If there are one or two scripts that have been blocked, I may try enabling them one by one to see if the site works again, but if there are ten scripts that have been blocked, I usually just close the tab.
A big part of the problem with web ads is that they are delivered and hosted completely by third parties, leaving web site owners no control over the ads that appear within their content-- including trackers and analytics, even if the site owner is not okay with allowing the users to be tracked. If the site owners want to cover hosting costs and maybe even get paid for having a quality site with paid employees, they either have to get with the ad program the way it is, or else do something like institute a paywall.
There are companies out there that claim to be able to do this on the fly to sneak ads through someone's adblocker, once it's detected, but I've visited those sites listed as customers of this technology, and I breezed right in with no ads and no adwalls.
I'm doing some guessing here, as I don't have any direct experience with web ads from a site owner's perspective (I just know about getting rid of them from the client end), but it seems to me that it would be difficult to execute such "did we send our ads" checks from the server side, since the ads aren't hosted there, and the host site would not be expected to be aware of the specific ads that were supposed to be requested and served. It's not that it could not be done, but it would require changing the way the ad slingers do business that de-emphasizes their own autonomy in sending any ad they like to any site that has contracted with them for monetization, and they're not likely to do that.
The ultimate solution, from the site owner's perspective, would seem to be hosting the ads locally and making the ads indistinguishable from the content, but that would cut out the ad networks, and that's even worse for them than losing revenue from adblocking.
Ultimately, the solution, from the site owner's point of view, would seem to be to make the content inseparable from the content, as it is with a magazine print ad. That would take a big shift in the way web advertising is done, and it would weaken the position of the ad brokers, so in their minds, that may be a bigger evil than adblockers taking away some of their views.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
