alt Hacker NewsI mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.