About Our Project
The Ad Transparency Initiative is developed by Ad Safety Team of researchers at UC Davis. The goal of this project is to shed light on the journey of an ad across the digital advertising supply chain. Our study focuses on the monetization of problematic ad inventory and the entities that facilitiate it. We study the compliance of ad-tech standards and detect ad inventory misrepresentations. We also notify affected buyers and sellers to mitigate ad inventory misrepresentation in the digital advertising supply chain.
What is Dark Pooling?
Pooling is commonly used to share resources among related publishers in online advertising. For example, sharing advertising infrastructure and AdX accounts between child and parent publishers allows efficient operation and management. Pooling can be detected by checking whether an AdX-issued publisher ID is shared by multiple publisher websites. Dark pools are pools in which publisher IDs are shared by organizationally-unrelated publishers (possibly of differing reputation). It is considered a dark practice because it deceives potential buyers about the actual source of the ad inventory, making it difficult or impossible for a buyer to figure out where their ad will eventually be placed. Dark pooling is typically abused by low-quality websites to launder their ad inventory by making it indistinguishable from that of reputed publishers.
More details can be found in our research paper (Accepted at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy)
Who's involved? Why you should consider contributing to our research?
Buyers
Ad buyers (or advertisers) are the key stakeholder in this project. For advertisers, the digital advertising ecosystem represents both an enormous opportunity for growth as well as a significant business risk when ad placements are served in inappropriate or unsafe media environments. We are seeking to understand challenges and technical limitations that buyers face as they engage vendors in their digital advertising initiatives. Advertiser participation in our study will allow us to include buyer-side perspective in our research and enable advertisers to identify mechanisms to protect their ad spend.
Sellers
Ad exchanges, ad networks, and publishers are all part of the supply chain we seek to study as part of this project. As the supply chain has grown to include more intermediaries and players, the journey that ad takes to its final destination has become more complicated to uncover. Our goal is to create awareness among sellers around the instances of dark pooling and other similar misrepresentations in their partner networks. Seller participation in our study will enable them to improve standards compliance and better serve advertiser needs.
