2023/06/14 by Emmanouil Papadogiannakis, Papadogiannakis, Emmanouil, Nicolas Kourtellis +5
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Digital Games and Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Spam and Phishing Detection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.08418
openalex publication_date 2023/06/14 · openalex created_date 2023/06/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that involves numerous agents and intermediaries. Stimulated by the lack of transparency, but also the enormous potential profits, bad actors have found ways to circumvent restrictions, and generate substantial revenue that can support websites with objectionable or even illegal content. In this work, we evaluate transparency Web standards and show how shady actors take advantage of gaps to absorb ad revenues while putting the brand safety of advertisers in danger. We collect and study a large corpus of thousands of websites and show how ad transparency standards can be abused by bad actors to obscure ad revenue flows. We show how identifier pooling can redirect ad revenues from reputable domains to notorious domains serving objectionable content, and that the phenomenon is underestimated by previous studies by a factor of 15. Finally, we publish a Web monitoring service that enhances the transparency of supply chains and business relationships between publishers and ad networks.