Are you being served?

If you've just joined in, I am pleased to announce that I have recently revived my blog after a good three years. Not that I had some great posts back then, but it's been revived nonetheless, for good or bad. :)

A lot has changed in three years. I don't particularly remember having something to do with feeds or even HTML editing back then and so I was adding all the feeds (and other buttons) on my blog today. My recently acquired knowledge on Adsense and Adwords also led me to create accounts there. Yes, I hope you readers find my posts interesting - even informative at times - and that you keep coming back for more.

Now to what I was wondering about - when an advertiser pays all that moolah to display her ads on the network, is there a way to find out if the ads were really displayed? I am all for Google's brand name and all - after all it's been my favorite search engine ever since I heard of it, but that should not stop me from questioning and confirming - should it?

So coming back to the question here, let's assume there's an advertising network X who's been around long enough for advertisers and publishers to trust it. What do you think would prevent X from inflating the ad display figures? If I have, let's say, a multiplier that just doubles the number of Impressions for an ad and gives that in the stats to the advertiser, who really can question my results? Seems like trust is the only thing that's keeping this business going! And that's good enough as long as nobody's getting the same idea as me..

Before we forget, I'm just wondering :)