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Ad Tech and Disinformation in the EU

March 2020

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GDI has collected a list of nearly 1,400 news domains suspected of disinforming the public in Europe

Our sources include public lists compiled by:● Le Monde● Konspiratori● EuDisinfoLab● EUvsDisinfo● KremlinWatch● StopFake.org● Central European University

...as well as proprietary and confidential lists

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We sampled these 1,400 domains and used their Alexa rankings to estimate monthly traffic.

Alexa rank, while not perfect, is a reasonable proxy for traffic numbers.

Estim

ated

Mon

thly

Vis

itors

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We used a market average CPM of 0.7 ($0.70 per 1,000 pageviews) to estimate advertising revenues for the 1,400 domain sample.

This is a conservative estimate. Other studies have calculated market average CPM as high as $2.80 per 1,000 pageviews.

We estimate that our system to be about 20% EU-targeted, based on available metadata.

Therefore, we scale the revenue estimate for our sample ($7.6M) to get the annualised ad revenues paid to EU disinfo sites.

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Given this approach, we estimate:

US$76 Millionin ad revenues flow each year to disinfo sites in Europe

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To understand the sources of this revenue, we automatically crawled domains in our sample and identified ad services used to monetise the site’s traffic.

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Google supports the largest number of disinformation domains in our sample.

NOTE: For Google, the ad shares & revenues for Google Ads and Double Click have been combined.

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Five companies account for 97% of ad revenues paid to EU disinformation sites: Google, Criteo, OpenX, Taboola and Xandr.

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For Google, the revenues paid to disinfo sites are mostly from Google Ads.

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Our estimates are conservative & lower bounds of the monetisation of disinfo sites in Europe.

Accurate estimates of online ad revenue are very hard to discern given the opacity of the online market.

At every step, we took the most conservative approach to obtain a lower bound for these numbers.

Other estimates put these numbers much, much higher. An analysis by AdBeat of abcnews.com.co, for example, estimates their revenue to be orders of magnitude higher than our method.

These findings are the tip of the iceberg.

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Country Profiles: Brands, sites and ad service firms

NOTE: All sites included have been flagged by partners

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Brand Advertisements

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Brand Advertisements

● All of these brands were found on the sites queried.

● Brand ads will vary by anyone’s data footprint & geolocation.

● Screenshots taken from locations in France, Germany, and Italy.

● Given EU data protections, most ads provide clickable information on the company providing ad.

● This is what has been used to map these specific ads to the ad providers.

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Bulgaria

Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google

Example of information provided when ad is clicked on from site.

Exchange on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Czech Republic

Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google and Criteo

Exchanges on site supplying these ads: Google

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France

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Taboola

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Germany

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: The Trade Desk

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: AppNexus

Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Ad4Mat

Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: A4Mat

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Hungary

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Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google and Criteo

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Italy

Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google. Note: Article debunked by EEAS (EUvsDisinfo)

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Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Criteo

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Slovakia

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying this specific ad: Criteo

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Spain

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Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying these specific ads: Google

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Exchanges on site supplying these apecific ads: Google

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For More Information:

info@disinformation.orgwww.disinformationindex.org