Citation:
Nurse JRC, Buckley O (2017) . Behind the scenes: a cross-country study into third-party website referencing and the online advertising ecosystem, Human-Centric Computing and Information Sciences vol Art 40, (DOI: 10.1186/s13673-017-0121-6)
Abstract:
The ubiquitous nature of the Internet provides an ideal platform for human communication,
trade, information sharing and learning. Websites play a central role in these
activities as they often act as a key point of interaction for individuals in navigating
through cyberspace. In this article, we look beyond the visual interface of websites to
consider exactly what occurs when a webpage is visited. In particular, we focus on the
various web scripts that are often programmatically executed, to explore the extent to
which third-party sites are referenced. Our aim is to study these references and the ecosystem
that they create. To gain maximal impact while also allowing for a cross-country
comparison, our study is scoped to an assessment of the top 250 sites in the UK, USA,
Germany, Russia and Japan. From our analysis, there are various novel contributions
of note. These include the empirical identifcation of a vast ecosystem of third-party
information processing sites, especially advertisement networks, and the evidential
discovery of a few signifcant players irrespective of country and locale. Through a user
study, we also fnd that while individuals do have some knowledge of the prevalence
of advertisements in websites, their understanding of the variety of activities that occur
upon visiting websites, is not widely known. Going forward, we therefore advocate
for increased transparency in such activities and the wider online advertisement
ecosystem.
