The problem is with publishers too small to individually attract the attention of advertisers... which is most of the ones that use advertising to begin with. Any way to solve that problem reintroduces an ad network in some form or another.

Or would you say that advertising is only for big shots, and small-time publishers should just rely on up-front payment?

Third party ad networks should pivot and provide a single binary executable (e.g. Go/Rust/C++ application) that a website owner adds to his website. And that binary app delivers the ads from the ad network and the website can choose how he integrates it to the website. The ad network will receive a list of URLs from the binary where it checks (with different IPs) if the ad is displayed to the user and if the image file hash is the same. Such an ad would be good for the users privacy (no more third party JS), good for the website owner (more ads delivered, more money), and good for the ad network (ads delivered also to users with adblockers) - a win-win-win situation.

even big publishers like Yahoo can't do that because there's an average of 20 companies between then and the brands advertising. publisher would love to be alone in the field and pocket the .20 per click. but ad agencies go a long way to doubt the publisher reports etc and try to pay less.

every month a new layer show up, with the sole promise of allowing the ad vendor to pay less for the publisher. the fad du jour is viewable.