How much do advertisers pay to reach you? Panagiotis Papadopoulos - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

If If yo you ar are no not pa paying ng fo for it it, , yo you ar are the the product ct*: :

How much do advertisers pay to reach you?

Panagiotis Papadopoulos FORTH-ICS, Greece & University of Crete, Greece panpap@ics.forth.gr

Nicolas Kourtellis Telefonica Research, Spain Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez Telefonica Alpha, Spain Nikos Laoutaris Data Transparency Lab, Spain

*phrase originator: Andrew Lewis, a.k.a. blue_beetle

Data-driven economy

• The user data of an IT company

→ contribute to its overall market valuation

• Companies pursue more and more users personal data
• By purchasing them
• By providing free services (Google search, Facebook etc.)

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How is all this data converted to money??? ecosystem of digital advertising ($194.6 billion in 2016)

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Digital advertising

progressively moving towards a programmatic model ads are matched to interests of individuals elaborated user tracking privacy implications

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How much do advertisers actually pay to reach you?

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The Motivation…

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The Background…

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Programmatic auctions of RTB

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Ad Exchange (ADX) Real-time Auction Website on the user’s browser Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) Bid Request (+user info) 0.95 CPM (+impression) Available ad-slot

0.95 CPM (+impression)

RTB price notification channel

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Available ad-slot Ad Exchange (ADX) Real-time Auction Website on the user’s browser Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) nURL example: cpp.imp.mpx.mopub.com/imp?ad_domain=amazon.es&ads_creative_id=ID&bidder_id=ID&..&bidder_name=..& charge_price=0.95&country=ESP&currency=EUR&latency=0.116&mopub_id=ID&pub name=.. A D Impression delivery (i) you won, (ii) here’s the charge price, (iii) the impression is rendered successfully Winning notification

The Challenge…

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Encrypted prices on the rise

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• Charge prices in nURLs tend to be encrypted

ØEncryption is a regular practice in desktop RTB auctions (~68%) ØLower but rapidly increasing in mobile RTB auctions (~30%)

Previous work [Olejnik, 2013] assumes encrypted prices follow the same distribution as cleartext. But is that so?

Encrypted

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Our approach

• 1. Leverage Real-Time Bidding (RTB) protocol:

1. 74% of programmatically purchased advertising 2. $8.7 billion in 2016 only in US

• 2. Methodology to calculate at real time the overall value advertisers

pay per individual user based on her leaked information.

• 3. Year-long dataset (2015) of 1600 real users

+ 2 real probing ad campaigns

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Methodology

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YourAdValue browser extension

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Monitors RTB nURLs & collects features: (i) auction-specific metadata and (ii) personal data the user leaks while browsing the web

Price Modeling Engine (PME)

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Required input for the PME

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The Evaluation…

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Evaluating our approach

• Offline year-long (2015) dataset D with

mobile traffic from 1600 real users

• Weblog Ads Analyzer:

Øfilter RTB traffic and Øextract features (auction’s metadata and user data) from nURLs

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Metric D Time period 12 months Impressions 78,560 IAB category

• f publishers

18 RTB publishers ∼5.6k/month

Feature extraction

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Features that affect prices (1/3)

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Distribution of charge prices for the 2 most popular mobile OSes. Whiskers: 5th, 10th, 50th, 90th,95th percentiles

More Android devices, but iOS-based devices draw higher prices

Percentage of RTB traffic for top mobile OSes.

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1112 RTB share Month of the year Android iOS Windows Mob Other 0.01 0.1 1 10 100 Android iOS Charge price (CPM) Mobile Device OS

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Features that affect prices (2/3)

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Distribution of the charged prices per ad-slot size (sorted by area size). Whiskers: 5th, 10th, 50th, 90th,95th percentiles

Larger ad-slot sizes do not necessarily get charged more

0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 320x50 468x60 728x90 120x600 300x250 160x600 300x600 Charge price (CPM) Ad-slot sizes

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Features that affect prices (3/3)

• user location affects the median charge prices
• during the day median charge prices are of similar range
• > early morning hours - noon: more charge prices with increased values
• some IABs are more costly than others
• > (“Business & Marketing” more expensive than “Science”)

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See more about features in the paper…

Price Modeling Engine: ad campaigns

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Real probing ad-campaigns

• 2 real probing ad-campaigns in 2016 (A1, A2):

various experimental setups

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Metric D A1 (enc) A2 (clr) Time period 12 months 13 days 8 days Impressions 78,560 632,667 318,964 IAB category

• f publishers

18 16 7 RTB publishers ∼5.6k/month ∼0.2k ∼0.3k Filter name Range of values (type) Cities Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville Time of day 12am-9am, 9am-6pm, 6pm-12am Day of week Weekday, Weekend Type of device Smartphone, Tablet Type of OS iOS, Android Ad-format (smartphone) 320x50, 300x250, 320x480 or 480x320 Ad-format (tablet) 728x90, 300x250, 768x1024 or 1024x768 Ad-exchange MoPub, OpenX, Rubicon, DoubleClick, PulsePoint Content category of publisher all IABs possible

Comparison of CPM costs for the different IAB categories in our dataset and the 2 probing adcampaigns.

Cost per IAB in cleartext and encrypted prices

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Median encrypted prices always higher than cleartext Time shift: More recent cleartext prices are higher than the ones last year

How much do advertisers pay to reach you?

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Encrypted Vs. Cleartext prices

“It’s safe to assume that encrypted prices follow the same distribution with cleartext prices.”

price distribution of encrypted prices (A1): → distinctly different → about 1.7x higher median value than cleartext prices (A2)

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Comparison of price distributions between cleartext and encrypted, for different time periods and datasets (D vs. A1 and A2).

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How much do advertisers pay to reach you?

• Cumulative cost from encrypted prices:

cannot surpass cleartext (still dominant).

• some users more costly than others
• median user costs 25 CPM

(73% of the users cost < 100 CPM)

• 2% of users cost 10-100× more to the

ad-ecosystem than the average user!

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Cumulative CPM paid per user in our year-long dataset (2015) 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 10-2 10-1 100 101 102 103 104 CDF Cumulative user cost (CPM) cleartext cleartext (time corr.)

• est. encrypted

total

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In summary…

• Methodology to measure cost of advertisers per individual user:
• At real time and on user’s side based on the user’s profile
• Leverage ad-auctions and RTB’s price notification channel
• Construct a model to estimate encrypted prices using as features

auction’s metadata and user’s leaked info. (> 82% accuracy)

• Our methodology is tested using a year-long dataset of 1600

real mobile users

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Takeaways

üEncrypted prices are 1.7x higher than cleartext üMedian user costs 25 CPM per year üTaking into account several different factors:

(HTTP+HTTPS, management and intermediaries costs, mobile+desktop traffic)

→ overall user ad-cost in the range of 0.54-6.85€ per year

→ cheaper than most users think (10s of euros*)

*Your browsing behavior for a big mac: Economics of personal information online. WWW’13

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