Untangling Header Bidding Lore

Aqeel, Waqar; Bhattacherjee, Debopam; Chandrasekaran, B.; Godfrey, P. Brighten; Laughlin, Gregory; Maggs, Bruce M.; Singla, Ankit

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-44081-7_17

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…In [4], authors measure the prevalence, pricing dynamics and characteristics of a different type of programmatic ad-buying namely header bidding. In [47] the authors conduct an analysis of the header bidding advertising ecosystem using a set of real users. Header Bidding is a relatively newly introduced adbuying protocol which gains popularity among advertisers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

YourAdvalue: Measuring Advertising Price Dynamics without Bankrupting User Privacy

Pachilakis

Papadopoulos

Laoutaris

et al. 2021

Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst.

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The Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocol is by now more than a decade old. During this time, a handful of measurement papers have looked at bidding strategies, personal information flow, and cost of display advertising through RTB. In this paper, we present YourAdvalue, a privacy-preserving tool for displaying to end-users in a simple and intuitive manner their advertising value as seen through RTB. Using YourAdvalue, we measure desktop RTB prices in the wild, and compare them with desktop and mobile RTB prices reported by past work. We present how it estimates ad prices that are encrypted, and how it preserves user privacy while reporting results back to a data-server for analysis. We deployed our system, disseminated its browser extension, and collected data from 200 users, including 12000 ad impressions over 11 months. By analyzing this dataset, we show that desktop RTB prices have grown 4.6x over desktop RTB prices measured in 2013, and 3.8x over mobile RTB prices measured in 2015. We also study how user demographics associate with the intensity of RTB ecosystem tracking, leading to higher ad prices. We find that exchanging data between advertisers and/or data brokers through cookie-synchronization increases the median value of display ads by 19%. We also find that female and younger users are more targeted, suffering more tracking (via cookie synchronization) than male or elder users. As a result of this targeting in our dataset, the advertising value (i) of women is 2.4x higher than that of men, (ii) of 25-34 year-olds is 2.5x higher than that of 35-44 year-olds, (iii) is most expensive on weekends and early mornings.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

YourAdvalue: Measuring Advertising Price Dynamics without Bankrupting User Privacy

Pachilakis

Papadopoulos

Laoutaris

et al. 2021

Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst.

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“…Advertisers and publishers can make changes into the campaigns, however, given the sheer amount of data required for deep optimization, in practice it is mostly the algorithms that are tasked with ensuring that the campaign achieves its objectives (Hirth, 2017). More advanced options exists, in order to give publishers more control over their advertising inventory, such as using header bidding (Aqeel et al, 2020) or the waterfall system (Gerardin and Katsifis, idem). While capable of increasing publishers' revenues, these media trading methods are even more complex, requiring advanced technical skills.…”

Section: The Programmatic Media Buying Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Programmatic Advertising and Online Publishers: The Case of Libertatea.Ro

Ungureanu,

Belaşcu,

Horobeț

et al. 2023

Studies in Business and Economics

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Programmatic advertising rose in the early 2000s, aiming at streamlining the online media buying process. It offered marketers the means to buy millions of advertising impressions instantly and helped publishers increase their revenues. The deployment of automated algorithms for media trading led to a significant decrease in campaign setup and management costs and created a new revenue stream for online publishers. However, by the late 2010s, the emergence of ever more complex algorithms and the opaque practices of the Advertising Technology (AdTech) companies in charge of them have led to complaints that programmatic advertising functions largely as a “black box”. This article inquires into the programmatic media trading process, with a focus on the impact of the algorithms’ increased sophistication on the monetization strategies of online publishers. We analyze the case of Libertatea.ro, a leading Romanian newspaper, in its attempt to offset the decrease of revenue from printed circulation by increasing revenues generated through its online website. The findings show that publishers are forced to apply increasingly complex website monetization strategies. This can, in turn, lead to a loss of control over their advertising inventory and decreased bargaining power when facing AdTech companies, thus threatening the economic models of online publishing.

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“…Header bidding (HB) is a new online advertising technology that initiates ad auctions from the browser instead of relying on an ad server (see [11] for detail). We used the open source tools from [11] to analyze HB ads in H t100 and H b100 . Out of the 200 web sites, we find that 17 have HB ads on landing pages.…”

Section: Ads and Trackersmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Landing and Internal Web Pages

Aqeel

Chandrasekaran

Feldmann

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference

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Untangling Header Bidding Lore

Cited by 4 publications

References 20 publications

YourAdvalue: Measuring Advertising Price Dynamics without Bankrupting User Privacy

YourAdvalue: Measuring Advertising Price Dynamics without Bankrupting User Privacy

Programmatic Advertising and Online Publishers: The Case of Libertatea.Ro

On Landing and Internal Web Pages

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