> Google and the other major players are reluctant to do that because it's much, much harder to do a server side integration solution without compromising user privacy by handing the third party owning that server a lot of intimate knowledge about the ads being served to a customer.
They might be able to address this by flipping things around. Instead of the ad service providing ads to the content provider for the content provider to them embed in the content and server, have the content provider provide content to the ad service which then puts in the ads and serves the content.
Let's say content provider foo.com wants ads from Google. One way this could be done is for foo.com to organize their site so that any pages they want ads on come from content.foo.com. They would set content.foo.com to point to a server run by Google. That server would provide a way for foo.com to put their content there, with some mechanism for Google to do the ad integration and then serve the pages.
In the current status quo, there is a data détente that keeps either solution from happening: advertisers don't want to give third-party websites intimate knowledge of ads vended because they don't want to compromise user privacy (or more cynically: they don't want to give third-party sites so much info about what ads are run to what users that those sites cut out the middle-man and just broker adds to run for users directly). But third-party sites don't want to give intimate details of users of their site to ad companies for symmetrical reasons (Google has dipped its toe into social media before).
If the industry moves to a place where only server-injected ads are profitable, something will surely give here. The end result will be more large conglomerates knowing more about us than ever before, unfortunately.
They might be able to address this by flipping things around. Instead of the ad service providing ads to the content provider for the content provider to them embed in the content and server, have the content provider provide content to the ad service which then puts in the ads and serves the content.
Let's say content provider foo.com wants ads from Google. One way this could be done is for foo.com to organize their site so that any pages they want ads on come from content.foo.com. They would set content.foo.com to point to a server run by Google. That server would provide a way for foo.com to put their content there, with some mechanism for Google to do the ad integration and then serve the pages.