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SUMMARY:Measuring and Analyzing Online Advertising - Paul Barford (the Uni
 versity of Wisconsin)
DTSTART:20140416T150000Z
DTEND:20140416T160000Z
UID:TALK51622@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Eiko Yoneki
DESCRIPTION:Advertising is one of the primary means for revenue generation
  for millions of websites and mobile apps.  While the majority of online a
 dvertising revenues are based on pay-per-click\, alternative forms such as
  impression-based display and video advertising have been growing rapidly.
   In this talk\, we present two perspectives on measuring and analyzing on
 line advertising and discuss our findings from both perspectives.  The fir
 st is the is web publisher perspective\, where we focus on the problem of 
 fraudulent traffic that aims to inflate advertising impressions on website
 s.  To assess this problem we deploy a set of honeypot sites\, which provi
 des a window into the basic mechanisms used for impression fraud and in pa
 rticular enables us to identify pay-per-view (PPV) networks.  Our results 
 show that PPV networks deliver hundreds of millions of fraudulent impressi
 ons per day\, resulting in hundreds of millions of lost advertising dollar
 s annually.  The second perspective is that of users\, who are the targets
  for online ads.   Our goal is to understand the features and dynamics of 
 the mechanisms that are used to place ads on web sites.  For this study\, 
 we develop a scalable crawling capability that enables us to broadly gathe
 r the details of ads on websites including creatives and landing pages.  O
 f critical importance in this work is the recognition that a user's profil
 e can have a significant impact on ads that are shown. Using our profile-e
 nabled system\, we gathered ads from a large number of websites using dive
 rse profiles.  We report the details of the findings from measurements tha
 t highlight how and when targeting is used in online advertising. \n\nBio:
  Paul Barford is a professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wis
 consin - Madison.  He was a visiting professor at the University of Cambri
 dge and an EPSRC Visiting Fellow in 2011.  His research interests are in n
 etworking\, security and large data analysis. \n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Builiding
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