Aspen Policy Academy

• Amina Asim

Over the last two decades, ad buying has shifted from traditional methods—publishers directly dealing with advertisers—to programmatic advertising—using software to buy and sell ads. Driving these shifts, “ad-tech” (advertising technology) giants like Facebook and Google have seen a dramatic increase in their ad revenue while newsrooms across the country and the world have seen declining profits, leading to reduced newsroom staffing and other impacts on news publishing. This project presents a framework for auditing the current advertising supply chain in order to understand its impact on the journalism ecosystem. In particular, the project focuses on advertisement fraud and its effects on user and audience trust.

Click right to view the story arc on programmatic advertising, or to watch a short video explaining how programmatic advertising works.