It is a fact that online advertising industry is expected to a fraud that costs it several billion dollars. There are efforts to regulate this by announcing of certification of legitimate publishers and advertisers. This certification programme is called TAG or Trustworthy Accountability Group. TAG will basically certify companies who create ads and web sites which display them.
You may wonder why an advertiser himself is not able to judge the quality of the web site. In practice, ads are sold often in automated auctions in vast networks. These networks have a huge scale and are opaque. They can serve as traffic laundering operations for criminals. An advertiser may get ripped off on business alone on one of these networks. It is difficult to say whether the network was in the know of things or should have known them.
It is an effort to make the middlemen accountable. Whether this succeeds or not depends how TAG wards off companies that violate the basic standards from getting the certification. They have fixed a fee of $ 10000 which will be waived for smaller firms.