Who is going to go around approving 100 minor ads for each timeslot, with no targeting? This sounds like a recipe for making no money. I think the GP is just nostalgic for TV ads.
Magazines and newspapers and television and radio and billboards and (usually) podcasts are all existence proof that someone will go around approving 100 minor ads.
Might be missing something, how is "every 100th impression" during a timeslot that on average contains 100 impressions different from just selling a single impression?
Just seems like a less transparent way of doing the same thing.
The same way that selling a timeslot that happens to be sized so that on average there will be one impression is not selling one impression. You aren't pretending to be able to accurately decide whether any given page load is an impression. You aren't even guaranteeing that there will be a page load, let alone an impression.
It seems like a way of directly eliminating fraud, by preventing people from having an avenue to lie about impressions, and a way of discencentivizing tracking, since impressions stop being the billing metric and therefore stops "needing" to be accurate. Hopefully this (as well as the other things suggested by OP to discentivize tracking) would result in less tracking and less hoarding of dangerous user data.
Agreed... Timeslots seem like slapping a technical restriction from a prior medium on the web for no particular reason. I'm not even sure what problem it's actually meant to solve?
No reason timeslots can't be sold in the minutes, seconds, or even miliseconds on high traffic sites. Five figures assumes a long timeslot.
You could even do "every 100th impression during the timeslot" or so on without doing anything that would offend the user you are replying to.