• DeepSee has launched the Publisher Research Portal platform, which provides advertisers and agencies with information about publisher quality for programmatic advertising placements.
• The platform analyzes websites for ad load, presence of pirated content, and traffic stability, enabling assessment of risks and content quality.
• The main goal of the platform is to improve transparency in the industry and assist advertisers in optimizing programmatic advertising procurement.

Consulting group DeepSee has introduced a new product, which its founders call an equivalent of SimilarWeb for advertisers. The tool is designed to increase transparency in the industry, particularly against the backdrop of increasing cases of fraud and scams.

DeepSee, primarily a provider of consulting services, uses web crawlers to explore the Internet and offers advertisers tools like exclusion lists. Leveraging data obtained through these crawlers, DeepSee has created something akin to a nutrition label for food products, explaining its contents.

Rocky Moss, CEO and co-founder of DeepSee, stated that detecting "unstable" traffic may indicate that a site "used organic or paid means to attract a large number of visitors or bots to its site," which is an interesting metric for advertisers.

DeepSee's technology analyzes content on websites, looking for phrases like "click this link" and "torrents," indicating that the site likely contains links to pirated content. Portal users can select their preferences regarding which sites to avoid and which to optimize, aiding in the development of a programmatic advertising procurement strategy, said company co-founder Antonio Torres in an interview with Marketing Brew.

According to Moss, the main goal is to create a SimilarWeb for advertisers, using the collected analytics to measure and understand publisher traffic. Among the beta testers of the new product are The Trade Desk and TripleLift, Moss said.

Here's how the tool works in practice

Take the site www3.forbes.com, a now-defunct subdomain of #Forbes.com, which, according to research by Adalytics reported by the Wall Street Journal, was recently caught monetizing Forbes articles in the form of slideshows in an obvious attempt to generate additional ad revenue. Research portal DeepSee shows that this site, at the time of its existence, had three "red flags," such as an "aggressive ad refresh schedule," which may indicate that the site either repeats the same ad or accesses others with a frequency that the portal describes as "not compliant with leading DSP recommendations."

Conversely, on the New York Times site, according to DeepSee, "‘no malicious programs were found... low average ad density, Ads.txt file, and strong inbound link profile’."

Who will use it?

"My initial idea was to bring the most benefit to the advertiser," said Moss, but added that he "hopes this tool will be useful to the entire AdTech industry." For example, he said, SSPs or AdExchanges can use this tool to vet publishers they accept, then continue to monitor them after acceptance.

"It's unrealistic to expect [SSPs] to monitor thousands and thousands of their sites," says Moss. "Many of the best SSPs approve sites manually, but even then you are not immune to error."

Another beacon trying to break through the murky fog of ad tech

The DeepSee platform is one of many research products in AdTech offered by companies like Sincera and #Adalytics, whose goal is to provide advertisers with tools to navigate the complexity.

Waste thrives in the advertising technology ecosystem. Last year, the Association of National Advertisers published a #report (U.S. data) consisting of two parts, according to which 15% of advertising budgets spent on programmatic advertising in the open Internet (or about $10 billion) went to "‘ad-serving sites’" (#MFA). Since then, DeepSee has helped develop industry-wide guidelines for MFA inventory, although, according to researchers, their compliance still has not gained widespread adoption.

For Publishers

It's important to be aware of the need to maintain high-quality content and ad load to avoid blacklisting and improve reputation among advertisers.

Forecast

Various research platforms will continue to offer more such tools, and soon it will become the standard.

More Materials on This Topic:

• MRC's Guide Update on Defining Low-Quality Traffic
• The Forbes Scandal: Distrust in Publishers
• Increase in Fraud in the Russian Internet
• Market Participants Still Use MFA Sites
• What's MFA? Insights from Secret Meetings