I think this is just another case of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM", e.g. "no one ever got fired for advertising on TV or buying Google Ads or doing what the agency told them to do".
Solving this problem is not yet, unfortunately, a priority for advertisers. I wonder for how long.
The problem is that cleansing the display ad supply chain is complex, and some suppliers (notably "supply side platforms", or SSPs) are complicit in the fraud, knowingly signing up and profiting from publishers who pay for this fraudulent traffic. The article cited as footnote #1 gives some detail there.
Buyers have limited options to combat the problem. Spider.io does absolutely oustanding work, but they're a small company and can't deliver at scale. Larger, more widely adopted suppliers have solutions that (arguably) aren't work paying for.
Because display is a tonnage game and ad rates are so cheap (well under $1/thousand impressions wholesale), you can just bake the cost of fraud (and viewability, and other issues) into the cost of your buying. Assuming you can reliably measure your ad ROI, which only a fraction of advertisers can do.
[EDIT] another thing that could be helpful in building a signature is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060008/is-there-a-way-to...
and you are the only one here in the right track. the ad ecosystem IS moving to a bill per viewability model. though for the wrong reasons (drive advertiser expending down, like they did artificially with paying for click instead of display)
If only this could get so massively out of hands that advertisers gave up altogether on polluting the web and wasting internet bandwidth and computer resources. Then maybe google would become a search engine again and provide relevant search results, at the very least the internet would be less a global surveillance tool it has become people don't care enough or are too clueless.
