Personally, I think there's a few things theymos should do rather than nothing.
1) Offer or auction some long term deals to companies that are already trusted and have a history of advertising here. Many of these gambling companies are sponsoring streamers millions a month so I'm sure they'd put up a fairly large amount for a years ad subscription or something.
2) Hire someone trusted to vet all new adverts.
3 Implement Silver/Gold/Platinum/Lamborghini Memberships like the current Copper one that come with the benefits of a Full/Senior/Hero/Legendary etc, and maybe even some additional perks with a higher "premium" rank like the ability to change name, access to a exclusive sub board and so on.
Completely passive income for the forum
Essentially stops account sales and farming
Will severely dent people from fishing/begging for merit
Another similar option (with similar benefits) would be to allow people to purchase merit from the forum in order to rank up. I think a lot of people would probably be interested in buying Lamborghini memberships, but some may also be close to Legendary but are struggling to get enough merit to rank up, and may want to pay to get the ranking.
1) Offer or auction some long term deals to companies that are already trusted and have a history of advertising here. Many of these gambling companies are sponsoring streamers millions a month so I'm sure they'd put up a fairly large amount for a years ad subscription or something.
I don't think that theymos is a kind of guy that can easily change his opinions once he makes them, and there could be some legal issues he is concerned for future as well.
I disagree. In my experience, theymos is open to listening to arguments in favor of changing policy, and will do so if a sufficiently strong argument is made.
It seems that theymos already seems to be open to long-term deals, as he said that he will accept private offers to advertise. I think long-term deals are more of an issue for advertisers because there are many unknown variables, such as how effective an ad is, forum traffic in the future, how profitable a business will be in the future, etc.
Theymos
mentioned that he thought the process of buying ad space has a lot of friction. This could be addressed by automating the process of which advertisers purchase advertising. The initial vetting/setup is probably something that shouldn't be automated. Someone could potentially create an automated ad buying software that advertisers could buy ads on. I am not sure if the cost of creating these software would be worth the potentially higher revenue for the forum, especially if it needs to be integrated with the existing SMF software.