Many publishers believe consumers would pay more attention to online ads if they were just better. Now Fusion Media Group is acting on that sentiment: It is trying out a new system that rewards advertisers that make the most engaging ads by giving them bonus impressions.

The Univision-owned digital media company, whose 12 sites include Gizmodo, The Onion and Jezebel, is implementing the new approach by licensing advertising technology from ad-tech firm Performance Pricing LLC. The technology, called Impressions Per Connection, gauges the quality of ads by monitoring the number of user clicks and mouse-overs.

Bonuses are doled out on a sliding scale: The ads with the highest engagement rates get higher bonuses, which are capped at 20% of the total impressions purchased. The benefits for Fusion Media, theoretically: happier readers, happier advertisers and an added incentive to help close deals.

“We always have this desire, as most publishers do, to get the best possible advertisers on the site and the best possible creative,” said Mike McAvoy, executive vice president of sales for Fusion Media Group, who also serves as president and chief executive of Onion Inc.

“When you have premium content, you want the quality of the advertising to live up to the quality of the journalism and the comedy,” he said.

Fusion Media’s effort comes as the media world debates the causes for what many parties agree is a broken online ad model that has consumers tuning out marketers’ messages. Advertisers and agencies tend to put blame on publishers and ad tech companies for cluttering sites with too many ads, using intrusive formats that take over people’s screens and slowing down page-load times in the process. But publishers often pin the blame on the advertisers for not coming up with ads that are engaging.

Performance Pricing’s technology isn’t widely adopted at this stage: Publishers have run 72 campaigns using it so far, said Ari Rosenberg, the company’s president and founder.

Women’s lifestyle-focused publisher Refinery29 has used the technology on select campaigns for about a year and a half, spurred on when individual ad agencies began requesting it.

“There tends to be a push-and-pull between the advertiser and publisher and blame between the two about what’s causing performance to be positive or negative,” said Bart Boughton, the senior vice president for revenue operations at digital publisher Refinery29.

Sarah Baehr, executive vice president and managing partner of digital investment at Horizon Media, has firsthand experience with the ad technology. “It is a tactic that can help us extract more value from the media we purchase,” she said.

In theory, without any bonus, advertisers should already have an incentive to create ads that people actually want to engage with. But Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and partner of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, said the technology, over time, could lead to a higher standard of work.

“I think in general, advertisers are insensitive to the experience on the other end of their messages,” Mr. Goodby said. ”And this is a really good sign that perhaps there’s a mechanism for rewarding them.”

Some publishing executives questioned whether this model—essentially compensating advertisers for making a good ad—will do anything to solve the fundamental challenges of “ad avoidance” by consumers.

“You’re just putting lipstick on a pig,” said Joshua Topolsky, the editor in chief of The Outline, a digital news startup founded in 2016. “Three-by-twos, banners, takeovers, pushdowns—they don’t work.” The Outline features swipeable ads that Mr. Topolsky claims garner click-through rates well above the industry average.

Publishers can pay Performance Pricing a flat licensing fee for its technology or a single-digit percentage of the total value of the campaign run using the application.

Fusion Media Group declined to comment on the specifics of its agreement.