Keeping out the Masses: Understanding the Popularity and Implications of Internet Paywalls

Papadopoulos, Panagiotis; Snyder, Peter; Athanasakis, Dimitrios; Livshits, Benjamin

doi:10.1145/3366423.3380217

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…In THEMIS a CF can cheat in two ways: (1) as it is the entity orchestrating the confidential payments, it may send incorrect rewards to users or, (2) it could use its power to send rewards not only to the user but to other accounts of their control. Both of these actions may be discovered by either users or advertisers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A. In case of scenario (1) The users can provably challenge CF for incorrect behaviour by proving that the payment received does not correspond to the payment request they generated. To do so, the user calls the FSC to prove that the amounts received by the private payment does not correspond to the decrypted aggregate in the payment request E. We stress that in case a user must undergo such a scenario, only the aggregate amount of a single ad-catalog will be disclosed (and not its interaction with ads).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Digital advertising is the most popular way of funding websites, despite the many other alternative monetization systems that have been proposed [1]- [4]. However, web advertising has fundamental flaws, including market fragmentation [5], [6], rampant fraud [7]- [13], centralization around intermediaries (e.g., Supply/Demand-side platforms, Ad exchanges, Data Management Platforms) who absorb half of spent advertising dollars [14] and unprecedented privacy harm from the extensive tracking of users [15]- [18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

THEMIS: Decentralized and Trustless Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

Pestana,

Querejeta-Azurmendi,

Papadopoulos

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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Online advertising fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although users can access most websites free of charge, they need to pay a heavy cost on their privacy and blindly trust third parties and intermediaries that absorb great amounts of ad revenues and user data. This is one of the reasons users opt out from advertising by resorting ad blockers that in turn cost publishers millions of dollars in lost ad revenues.Existing privacy-preserving advertising approaches (e.g., Adnostic, Privad, Brave Ads) from both industry and academia cannot guarantee the integrity of the performance analytics they provide to advertisers, while they also rely on centralized management that users have to trust without being able to audit.In this paper, we propose THEMIS, a novel privacyby-design ad platform that is decentralized and requires zero trust from users. THEMIS (i) provides auditability to all participants, (ii) rewards users for viewing ads, and (iii) allows advertisers to verify the performance and billing reports of their ad campaigns. To demonstrate the feasibility and practicability of our approach, we implemented a prototype of THEMIS using a combination of smart contracts and zero-knowledge schemes. Performance evaluation results show that during ad reward payouts, THEMIS can support more than 51M users on a single-sidechain setup or 153M users on a multi-sidechain setup, thus proving that THEMIS scales linearly.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

THEMIS: Decentralized and Trustless Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

Pestana,

Querejeta-Azurmendi,

Papadopoulos

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Contrary to most popular news sites that progressively move towards paywalling their high quality content [30], fake news sites rely on ads to make profit. Indeed, some of these websites were even created with the sole purpose of luring ad clicks by publishing clickbait content [31,32].…”

Section: Which Third-party Trackers Were Persistently Embedded In Suc...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise and Fall of Fake News sites: A Traffic Analysis

Chalkiadakis¹,

Kornilakis²,

Papadopoulos³

et al. 2021

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Over the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of misinformation on the Internet, with online users constantly falling victims of fake news. A multitude of past studies have analyzed fake news diffusion mechanics and detection and mitigation techniques. However, there are still open questions about their operational behavior such as: How old are fake news websites? Do they typically stay online for long periods of time? Do such websites synchronize with each other their up and down time? Do they share similar content through time?Which third-parties support their operations? How much user traffic do they attract, in comparison to mainstream or real news websites?In this paper, we perform a first of its kind investigation to answer such questions regarding the online presence of fake news websites and characterize their behavior in comparison to real news websites. Based on our findings, we build a content-agnostic ML classifier for automatic detection of fake news websites (i.e., F1 score up to 0.942 and AUC of ROC up to 0.976) that are not yet included in manually curated blacklists. INTRODUCTIONLots of things we read online may appear to be true, often is not. False information is news, stories or hoaxes created to deliberately misinform or deceive readers. Usually, these stories are created to (i) either lure users and become a profitable business for the publishers (i.e., clickbait) or (ii) influence people's views, push a political agenda or cause confusion.False information can deceive people by looking like trusted websites or using similar names and web addresses to reputable news organisations.The most important types of fake news include: (a) Clickbait: stories that are carefully fabricated to gain more website visitors and drive advertising revenues for publishers. Such stories use sensationalist headlines to grab attention and increase Click-through rates normally at the expense of truth or accuracy. (b) Propaganda: stories that are created to deliberately mislead audiences, promote a biased point of view or particular political agenda. (c) Sloppy Journalism: stories with unreliable information or without verified facts which can mislead audiences. (d) Misleading Headings: stories that are not completely false but distorted using misleading or sensationalist headlines, in such a way that can spread quickly via social media sites where only headlines and small snippets of the full article are displayed on audience newsfeeds. (e) Satire: stories for entertainment and parody (e.g., the Onion, The Daily Mash, etc.).An analysis [1] found that on Facebook, the top 20 fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement than the top 20 election stories from 19 major media outlets. According to a different study [2], US citizens rate fake news as a larger problem than racism, climate change, or terrorism. According to the study, more than making people believe false things, the rise of fake news is making it harder for people to recognize the truth, thus, making them especial...

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“…Despite the various alternative monetization systems [1][2][3][4], there is no doubt that digital advertising is still the dominant way of funding the web. However, digital advertising has fundamental flaws, including market fragmentation [5,6], rampant fraud [7][8][9][10][11], centralization around intermediaries (e.g., Supply/Demand-side platforms, Ad exchanges, Data Management Platforms), who absorb half of spent advertising dollars [12], and cause unprecedented privacy harm by extensively track users [13][14][15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

THEMIS: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

Pestana¹,

Querejeta-Azurmendi²,

Papadopoulos³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Online advertising fuels the (seemingly) free internet. However, although users can access most of the web services free of charge, they pay a heavy cost on their privacy. They are forced to trust third parties and intermediaries, who not only collect behavioral data but also absorb great amounts of ad revenues. Consequently, more and more users opt out from advertising by resorting to ad blockers, thus costing publishers millions of dollars in lost ad revenues. Albeit there are various privacy-preserving advertising proposals (e.g., Adnostic, Privad, Brave Ads) from both academia and industry, they all rely on centralized management that users have to blindly trust without being able to audit, while they also fail to guarantee the integrity of the performance analytics they provide to advertisers. In this paper, we design and deploy THEMIS, a novel, decentralized and privacy-by-design ad platform that requires zero trust by users. THEMIS (i) provides auditability to its participants, (ii) rewards users for viewing ads, and (iii) allows advertisers to verify the performance and billing reports of their ad campaigns. By leveraging smart contracts and zero-knowledge schemes, we implement a prototype of THEMIS and early performance evaluation results show that it can scale linearly on a multi-sidechain setup while it supports more than 51M users on a single-sidechain.

show abstract

Keeping out the Masses: Understanding the Popularity and Implications of Internet Paywalls

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

THEMIS: Decentralized and Trustless Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

THEMIS: Decentralized and Trustless Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

The Rise and Fall of Fake News sites: A Traffic Analysis

THEMIS: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Ad Platform with Reporting Integrity

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