> The reason the internet tracking industry exists is entirely because the first party advertisers don't want to deal with attribution or anything like that.

Attribution exists because there has been in the past few years a major pressure from advertisers to relate actual sales with digital media investments.

If you go some years back a lot of major brands cut on their digital media investment because they weren't seeing a return when compared to other medium - like TV.

>They are only interested with selling their product. They contract out to third party companies specifically to not have to deal with those attribution issues.

They are interested in sales, branding and customer service. Some brands work hand-in-hand with media agencies - agencies who do the buying, manage and optimize all the media budget. These agencies have the technical know-how for campaign setup, automation, tracking, etc. It's not because they don't want to deal with it, it's because they would have to make a huge investment in human resources and tech. Some brands did/do move all of this in-house, or outsource it to agencies with exclusive, or with high FTAs.

> The reason those third parties have to resort to tracking is because advertising fraud is rampant on the internet and the first party advertisers want some assurance that they aren't just throwing money away.

Tracking is used to measure the performance of the campaigns - delivery itself, plus the results on the advertiser side. Ad fraud is indeed rampant, that's why there has been a lot of development to mitigate this issue (like viewability).

> In the traditional advertising world, they can see the ad on TV or printed somewhere and know they aren't getting ripped off. There is absolutely no assurance on the internet that anyone is seeing your ad. So this proposal is saying that the advertiser should be in the business of assuring that their ads are being seen and delivering value, but it still doesn't solve the problem that the advertiser wants to be sure how many of their ads are being seen.

There's no way to know if an ad was seen on any media. TV campaigns are measured with a sample of the population with a device that tracks what's being viewed - but you don't know if a person is using their smartphone when your ad is running.
The problem with the internet is that there's no filtering between what's being done by a machine and by a human when it comes to the campaign delivery - and that's directly attached to the buying model for the advertiser. They wouldn't care about wastage if they didn't have to pay for it.

> Advertisers are paying for the number of times and ad is shown not the number of times it is clicked (this isn't the year 2000), so this proposal gives the advertisers more work to do without actually solving their real problem. I don't foresee any significant adoption of this proposal from advertisers.

Advertisers pay for a lot of things, for reach, for views, for clicks, for seconds of audio, for grids of outdoors, the list goes on, so you can't just say they aren't paying for clicks - hell Amazon is the new big boy in advertising and you pay per click.

The golden goose of attribution is to connect from the point of contact in advertising, all the way to the post-sale (the so called customer loyalty programs). If you can tell someone who saw an ad on Youtube, and when he went to a shop out of the shelf (where you have a 15% share of shelf), bought your product, and came to the social media saying how damn great that cookie is.

Any step closer to that is a win for advertisers.