WWW25 Paper Reading Note | Transparency? In This Economy?
This is a reading note of an accepted oral paper at WWW2025: Welcome to the Dark Side — Analyzing the Revenue Flows of Fraud in the Online Ad Ecosystem By Emmanouil Papadogiannakis, Nicolas Kourtellis, Panagiotis Papadopoulos and Evangelos Markatos. Link: https://doi.org/10.1145/3696410.3714899 The online ad ecosystem is a mess—a densely tangled web of players with overlapping roles, and worse, a dictionary full of confusing terminologies. This paper takes a flashlight to one particularly shadowy corner (ad fraud?...