Despite all the problems with online advertising, ads are not going away. Advertising is fundamental to the modern Internet economy.
In previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily, we have mostly dissected the problems of adtech–bots, tracking, fraud, brand safety. We have talked about some solutions–for example, JavaScript tags that you can put on a page to identify a bot before you serve it an ad. But these solutions don’t get the job done completely, because it isn’t possible to reliably identify bots. Today we explore another solution for adtech: the whitelist.
Marc Goldberg is the CEO of Trust Metrics, a company that provides whitelisting for advertisers. A whitelist is a list of domains that are acceptable to run your advertisements on. In order to build a whitelist, you need to review thousands of sites to judge which ones are reasonable places to publish an advertisement. Marc joins the show to describe how to build and scale a system for reviewing websites and judging whether they are safe to run ads against.
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