One the hardest decisions to make as a product manager is whether a feature is really ready to launch. Which brings me to the ongoing drama around the IAB's push to for display advertising to use "viewable impressions" to replace impressions as the currency for online display advertising. In short, viewable impressions are not ready to be launched and we need an alternative roadmap for the industry. The IAB, to its credit, recently admitted as much, after tests of viewability measurement resulted in widely disparate results. However, the intention remains to drive towards a currency, which is in my opinion is the wrong goal.
The problem that we're trying to solve is one of microeconomics. The display advertising world has too much supply - one might say, infinite supply - as compared to large, but finite demand. Sellers of ad inventory (aka publishers) can artificially create as much supply as they choose by simply adding more ad slots to each page of content. These new ad slots may be of unquestionably poor value to the advertiser given their position "below the fold" or, in some cases, they may only be viewable with extensive scrolling on behalf of the user. This situation devalues the inventory of the whole market, and especially hurts premium, high-quality publishers whose inventory is being compared to the inventory of low-quaity sites and/or sites with outright fraud.
Antique Trader