Related papers: Leveraging Google's Publisher-specific IDs to Dete…
Web traffic is a valuable data source, typically used in the marketing space to track brand awareness and advertising effectiveness. However, web traffic is also a rich source of information for cybersecurity monitoring efforts. To better…
PageRank is an algorithm introduced in 1998 and used by the Google Internet search engine. It assigns a numerical value to each element of a set of hyperlinked documents (that is, web pages) within the World Wide Web with the purpose of…
In recent years, Twitter has seen a proliferation of automated accounts or bots that send spam, offer clickbait, compromise security using malware, and attempt to skew public opinion. Previous research estimates that around 9% to 17% of…
Getting informed of what is registered in the Web space on time, can greatly help the psychologists, marketers and political analysts to familiarize, analyse, make decision and act correctly based on the society`s different needs. The great…
People are becoming increasingly concerned with their online privacy, especially with how advertising companies track them across websites (a practice called cross-site tracking), as reconstructing a user's browser history can reveal…
In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the revenue a web publisher gets through real-time bidding (i.e. from ads sold in real-time auctions) and direct (i.e. from ads sold through contracts agreed in advance). We consider a…
Traditional data monetization approaches face challenges related to data protection and logistics. In response, digital data marketplaces have emerged as intermediaries simplifying data transactions. Despite the growing establishment and…
Influence maximization is the problem of finding the set of nodes of a network that maximizes the size of the outbreak of a spreading process occurring on the network. Solutions to this problem are important for strategic decisions in…
Researchers have extensively explored how password creation policies influence the security and usability of user-chosen passwords, producing evidence-based policy guidelines. However, for web authentication to improve in practice, websites…
Increasingly, web content is automatically generated by large language models (LLMs) with little human input. We call this "LLM-dominant" content. Since LLMs plagiarize and hallucinate, LLM-dominant content can be unreliable and unethical.…
Wildlife traffickers are increasingly carrying out their activities in cyberspace. As they advertise and sell wildlife products in online marketplaces, they leave digital traces of their activity. This creates a new opportunity: by…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
Online advertising has become a key source of revenue for both web search engines and online publishers. For them, the ability of allocating right ads to right webpages is critical because any mismatched ads would not only harm web users'…
Web tracking by ad networks, social networks, and other third parties is privacy-invasive. To protect users' privacy an increasing number of countries are adopting new privacy laws. However, a major reason why their application on the web…
This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web…
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses…
This study analyzes how web audiences flow across online digital features. We construct a directed network of user flows based on sequential user clickstreams for all popular websites (n=1761), using traffic data obtained from a panel of a…
The Internet is constantly changing, and its hierarchy was recently shown to become flatter. Recent studies of inter-domain traffic showed that large content providers drive this change by bypassing tier-1 networks and reaching closer to…