Ad-tech researchers roll out portal to help advertisers evaluate publisher quality

Another lighthouse is trying to cut through the murky fog of ad tech.

The ad-tech consulting group DeepSee is rolling out a platform that the company’s founders say can help improve transparency in an industry that’s been plagued by claims of potential fraud and waste, it announced today.

Called the Publisher Research Portal, the platform is designed for advertisers and ad-tech intermediaries to use as a way to help gauge the quality of publishers across the expanse of programmatic advertising.

DeepSee, which is primarily a service-based shop that uses web crawlers to spelunk the depths of the internet and offer advertisers tools like exclusion and inclusion lists, is using the data gleaned from those crawlers to power the new platform, which offers something akin to a nutrition label for digital publishers. It can show advertisers what a website’s ad load looks like, whether it appears to host pirated content, and whether its traffic patterns are stable.

Rocky Moss, CEO and co-founder of DeepSee, said that a finding of “unstable” traffic could indicate that a website has “used inorganic or paid means to bring a bunch of visitors or bots to their website,” a potentially meaningful metric for advertisers.

DeepSee’s tech analyzes the text on websites, looking for phrases like “follow this link” and “torrents,” which likely signal that the site contains links to pirated content. users can select their preferences on what kind of sites to avoid and what to optimize for, which can help inform an advertiser’s programmatic advertising strategy, co-founder Antonio Torres told Marketing Brew.

The goal, Moss said, is to create a SimilarWeb for advertisers, referring to the analytics company that primarily measures and compares website traffic. The platform’s beta testers include The Trade Desk and TripleLift, Moss said.

Here’s how the tool works in practice: Let’s take the site www3.forbes.com, a now-defunct subdomain of Forbes.com that was, according to Adalytics research first reported by the Wall Street Journal, recently found monetizing Forbes articles as slideshows in an apparent effort to generate additional advertising revenue. DeepSee’s research portal indicates that the website had three risk factors when it was live, including an “aggressive ad refresh schedule,” which could indicate that the website is either rerunning the same ad or calling for others at a rate the portal describes as “falling short of the leading DSP guidance.”

Conversely, the New York Times’s website is identified as having “no malware detected…low average ad density, an Ads.txt file, and a strong inbound link profile,” according to DeepSee’s portal.

Who will use it? “My original hypothesis [was] that it would most benefit the buy side,” Moss said, but added that his “hope is that the tool is for anyone with skin in the game.” For example, he said, a supply-side platform or ad exchange could use the tool as a way to vet the publishers they onboard and then continue to monitor them after they’ve been accepted.

“It’s not realistic to expect that [an SSP] is keeping tabs on, you know, thousands and thousands of websites,” Moss said. “A lot of the best SSPs do have a human-approval element, but even so, you can’t do that at scale all the time.”

Join the club: DeepSee’s platform joins a growing list of ad-tech research products, like those offered by companies including Sincera and Adalytics, that are aimed at providing advertisers with tools to navigate the complexity, and often misaligned incentives, of digital media.

Waste in the ad-tech ecosystem is rampant. Last year, the Association of National Advertisers published a two-part report finding that 15% of programmatic, open-web advertising dollars, or about $10 billion in ad spend, went to made-for-advertising (MFA) websites. DeepSee has since helped establish industry-wide guidelines for MFA inventory, although enforcement is still lacking, according to industry researchers.