Assuming this is related to the AdSense thingy on the front page at the moment ... I think a decent amount of the problem is Google has virtually non-existant quality control.<p>I'd start by not approving all the scrapers and spammers and scammers. I'd avoid sites that get the majority of their traffic from reddit/etc, if they don't have natural traffic but they're consistently featured on social media sites they're probably spammers.<p>Once you take all the trashy people and their trashy sites out of the equation I think it would become a lot easier to detect fraud.<p>I would focus on:<p>1) high quality publishers<p>2) more interesting formats ... people used to talk about banner blindness, these days AdSense has to be pretty much shoved between sentences to be seen<p>3) actual support<p>Something probably like The Deck but more open.
I think the Internet needs an open trading platform for ad space. Something like an overarching OpenX. Google has their proprietary bidding system for Adwords, however we need a similar system for blogs, local websites, etc. Competition breeds quality and dynamism.<p>Another thing is that advertisers are tied to the same medium for long periods of time. It would be great to have a platform that could switch an ad (banner ad in this case) from one portal to another, depending on price, date and web traffic conditions.
I'd focus on the honesty in advertising. Something like VeriSign for specific scientifically-proveable claims in ads (e.g. "Kills 99.9% of bacteria in 5 minutes" over "Best ever product").
I wonder why Wordpress does not enter the ad game. A wordpress only marketplace that sells ad space on the wp-powered blogs/websites. Put it there in the installations, if a user wants to monetize his/her blog, it's there at the touch of a button.
No animated gifs, no flash, no javascript. Oh and since everyone here fawns over HTML5, no video, no audio.<p>Really, I'd like the original Google ads back again, you know, the text-only ones. Though perhaps not run by Google any more.