Online Advertising under Internet Censorship

Abstract

Online advertising plays a critical role in enabling the free Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. However, the rise in internet censorship events globally poses an economic threat to the advertising ecosystem. This paper studies this interplay and presents Advention, a system that provides censorship circumvention while serving relevant ads. Advention leverages the observation that ad systems are usually hosted on domains that are different from the publisher domains and are almost always uncensored. Taking cue from this, Advention fetches ads via the direct, uncensored, channel between users and the ad system. Preliminary results show that Advention not only offers high ad relevance compared to other popular relay-based circumvention tools, it also offers smaller page load times.