Follow the money Understanding economics of online aggregation and advertising

The large-scale collection and exploitation of personal information to drive targeted online advertisements has raised privacy concerns. As a step towards understanding these concerns, we study the relationship between how much information is collected and how valuable it is for advertising. We use HTTP traces consisting of millions of users to aid our study and also present the first comparative study between aggregators. We develop a simple model that captures the various parameters of today’s advertising revenues, whose values are estimated via the traces. Our results show that per aggregator revenue is skewed (5% accounting for 90% of revenues), while the contribution of users to advertising revenue is much less skewed (20% accounting for 80% of revenue). Google is dominant in terms of revenue and reach (presence on 80% of publishers). We also show that if all 5% of the top users in terms of revenue were to install privacy protection, with no corresponding reaction from the publishers, then the revenue can drop by 30%.