I'm with the SCRIPTED AND FLASH ADS ARE BAD crowd. All the sites that rely so heavily on them can cry a river until the sea levels rise, and it will
still not change this opinion. So your ads thing gets a
as it is now.
Believe it or not, despite what the marketing drones and your ad running clients tell you, ad blocking and script blocking exensions were invented
FOR A REASON. And the reason is that those producing the ads or running ad services have become terribly abusive in their end of the
relationship.
Yet coming from a graphic arts background (which could tie in closely to marketing) I understand ads are a necessary thing for most typical commerce.
So I'm not against ads completely. They need to be made sensible, not obnoxious and perhaps creating unnecessary risk.
If you want ad views, I in turn present that you make a new bargain with the site users. And this bargain requires that ads must be .png, .jpg, or
.gif (non-animated) and only have a link. No scripts. This means no JavaScript, Java, or Flash. The ad is either a plain link or form button.
What this means:
1. I as the user will not be annoyed by having blinky or moving things on your pages. This raises my opinion of your site significantly.
2. I as the user will not be under constant threat of malware or viruses as presented by 3rd party scripts and content which are more than happily
relayed by your advertizing parners as long as they get their money. (And even ads at more "mainstream" sites are as guilty. It's not just an ATS
thing.)
3. Users also reduce having data at risk too, even if viruses and malware don't quite hit them. There have been hacks revealed that allow some
malicious ads to parse through cookie and similar cache data by use of Flash or Javascript that they should NOT be allowed access to. You'd be
surprised at the passwords, and even things like banking or credit information that could be in there. Seriously.
4. Your pages will load faster (by an order of magnitude even), and thus you'll have the potential to get more pageviews in the long run with your
site.
So how would you ensure that ads are getting views?
You could talk to your client about using HTML form buttons to direct data and pass ID info that would let the recipient know traffic was coming from
your site. Also you could implement ad-info as part of a message posting-capcha. That might be an annoyance to some, but provided you'd keep your end
of the bargain on such a deal to make all ads STATIC IMAGE ONLY, I'd be more than happy to put up with it.
Poll your users. Ask if they'd be more willing to put up with ads if they didn't present such risks as the current script-heavy implementation. Odds
are I'm not alone here.
If you kick everyone that doesn't care for nor trust the scripted stuff, don't be too surprised if certain (possibly even large) portions of your
site particpants decide to pack up and move elsewhere. I know I make it a personal point to NOT do business with anyone that does REALLY ANNOYING
STUFF to get my attention. (Hello hosts file, I've got a new friend for you...) Such advertisers are like the telemarketers of the internet, and for
the most part have continued to earn their maligned reputation. As much as you seem enticed harp against browser-based blocking services, they're
like the "do not call list" - except they're much more likely to work.
Alternately, you could create a user funding pool instead of an all ad based site. I've been on a forum where if users donate X-amount of dollars,
the entire site goes ad-free for a given amount of traffic. And it's not a greedy "only you don't see ads" thing, it's a generous chip-in and
nobody gets bothered. About a year and a half ad-free. But then again, it's a niche software forum with: 1564 avg visits per day, 3741 avg views per
day, and 3298 active posters. Maybe a bigger site just can't manage that kind of feat?
) 
