Ad Radar is a browser extension that allows you to better understand how advertisers target you and how much they are willing to pay for you to see their ad.
Ad Radar relies on an Ad Tech technology known as Header Bidding, or Pre-Bidding.
Usually, when you go to a webpage that displays ads, the ads that are shown to you are determined almost instantaneously through a real time auction, and your personal data is used by the advertisers to determine how much they are willing to pay for a particular ad impression. This is often called Real-Time Bidding. Most of the time, this auction for your attention takes place outside the browser, in a network of complicated Ad Tech entities such as Supply Side Platforms, Ad Exchanges, and Demand Side Platforms. The only thing that the browser sees are the ads that won the auction, and we can't really know how much a particular ad impression cost.
With Header Bidding, an auction for the different ad spaces of the webpage also takes place in real time, but all the bids coming from the advertisers are gathered in the browser. In this case, Ad Radar can observe the (pre)bids that were received for each ad space, and display the value of these bids.
Ad Radar checks if the visited webpage uses some library that implements Header Bidding (for instance Prebid.js, often imported as pbjs), and thus only works on webpages that do.
There are two ways to install Ad Radar on your browser:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ad-radar/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ad-radar/glckjmlmkoofofclahanidfhaoihodjc
Select the latest release of Ad Radar on the right panel of the main GitHub page (or just click here).
Then, download the release file corresponding to your browser.
The next steps depend on your web browser:
Go to Settings > Extensions & Themes > Tools for all add-ons > Debug Add-ons > Load Temporary Add-on and choose the file firefox.xpi.
Note that Ad Radar will be uninstalled whenever you close the browser.
First of all, unzip the file chrome.zip into a folder called Ad Radar.
Then, go to Settings > Extensions.
Activate developer mode by clicking on Developer mode.
Click on Load unpacked and select the Ad Radar/src folder.
To uninstall Ad Radar, on the installation screen, click Remove under Ad Radar.
First, if you have an ad blocker, consider deactivating it temporarily. Also, make sure that you can see the icon of the extension on the top bar of your browser (on Chrome, you have to pin the icon). Then:
- Go to one of the webpages in our list of compatible webpages
- Wait for the page and its ads to finish loading
- Ad Radar shows:
- a red banner next to the ads that it detected and show the prices that were paid for them
- the number of detected ads on the icon of the extension
Ad Radar shows a red banner next to the ads that it detected, showing the cost of the ad in CPM (cost per mille, e.g. the price paid for a thousand impressions).
There are 3 possibilities when Ad Radar detects an ad:
- Ad Radar couldn't find any information about the ad cost. The banner shows
No information found for this ad. - Ad Radar observed the prebid that won the auction for this ad space and knows exactly how much was paid, and through which advertiser network. The banner shows
CPM of {price} paid via {network}. - Ad Radar observed prebids but the auction was won through another ad channel, so it retrieves the prebid with the highest cost. The banner shows
CPM of at least {price}.
Our browser extension is likely to work on the following webpages:
Conspiracy websites (from https://archive.is/vvpf9 )
| Languages | webpage |
|---|---|
| 🇫🇷 France | https://wikistrike.com |
| 🇺🇸 USA | https://bongino.com/ |
Political blog | | webpage | |UK Right-wing | Guido Rawkes https://order-order.com |
Satirical websites
| Languages | webpage |
|---|---|
| FR | https://www.legorafi.fr |
| EN | https://www.theonion.com |
Ad Radar was built using the framework https://github.com/abhijithvijayan/web-extension-starter.
See their README for instructions on how to build the release files.
To make sure that everything works, we recommend developping with the versions npm 8.1.2, node v16.13.2 and yarn 1.22.15.
Ad Radar is under the GNU Affero General Public License. See https://github.com/hestiaAI/ad-radar/blob/main/LICENCE for more details.
Ad Radar was built under the banner of The Eyeballs, a project that is part of the HestiaLabs project. We can anticipate multiple opportunities for further collaboration with groups of people who want to use technology to better understand the ways attention is monetized online. Please email eyeballs@hestialabs.org.