The Ad Tech Industry is a Non-Transparent Mess, and DecryptAds Aims to Do Something About It — DecryptAds
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What is DecryptAds?
DecryptAds is an ad-tech transparency platform that maps programmatic supply chains<br>so that researchers and the public can trace hidden flows of ad tech data, compare against<br>disclosures, and publish evidence-backed findings.
Why Now?
We founded DecryptAds because we care about programmatic advertising and know it powers the<br>open web, keeping a wide range of content free while paying creators to do what they love.
The Hidden Scope of the Problem
Nearly 300 ad-tech companies in our corpus are registered in sanctioned, adversarial,<br>or financial-secrecy jurisdictions and they appear in the declared supply of many of<br>the sites and apps people use (almost certainly without knowing) every single day.
This happens because the entire “Know Your Customer” (KYC) process in ad tech is generally<br>considered to be a near impossible task because it works across the scale of the Internet<br>itself, or at least that’s what the ad tech industry would like everyone to think. However,<br>our team has found that by associating the country various ad tech companies are associated<br>with (i.e. where they are legally founded, have significant staff, or are headquartered) one<br>can begin to get a sense of the geographical risk involved, which immediately starts to paint<br>a very specific picture when compared against the broad scope of sites and apps some of these<br>companies are monetizing.
In support of this, DecryptAds’ data provides a first-pass sense of geographic risk. It uses<br>a keyword match against the address a company discloses in sellers.json (grounded in OFAC,<br>U.S. Executive Order 14117, and FATF / financial-secrecy frameworks), so treat these buckets<br>as hints to pursue further, not strict determinations.
Early on in our analysis, our team realized that while there are programmatic ad tech<br>companies all over the world, only certain countries check the proverbial box of elevated<br>risk when one of these global companies are registered there. As such we have categorized our<br>ad tech geo risk data into the following buckets*:
Sanctions: Russia. (81 ad tech companies)
Adversary: China and Hong Kong. (84 ad tech companies)
Secrecy Haven: Cyprus, Panama, Seychelles, British Virgin Islands, Jersey, and Gibraltar. (24 ad tech companies)
Elevated Risk: Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, and Pakistan. (98 ad tech companies)
Note: The jurisdictions shown are those that actually had a matching company; each tier<br>is defined by the frameworks above. Numbers shown are as of this writing and likely to<br>increase.
Explore our comprehensive<br>Ad Systems database
Or jump directly to our<br>Geo Risk feature<br>to surface what we know about those ad systems
That’s Wild, So… What is Programmatic Advertising?
For many people, this term does one of two things: either it makes your eyes glaze over or it<br>prompts a million questions. What the term essentially references however, are the text,<br>image and video ads which are being bought and sold through complex auctions over the<br>internet. These ads show up on publisher websites, apps and connected TV experiences and are<br>part of a system with trillions of user data points flowing like a firehose with millions of<br>advertisers and thousands of ad tech companies vying for your attention.
This is also sometimes referred to as “Real Time Bidding” (RTB), the “bidstream”, or any<br>number of other obscure names for the same ad tech systems. Most of this ad tech technology<br>is also locked away in obscure transparency files (ads.txt, app-ads.txt, sellers.json,<br>buyers.json, adagents.json). Here at DecryptAds our team has built a platform that regularly<br>hunts for these files across the globe and layers new context over them while enriching the<br>results with other, novel datasets. We’ve even baked in a rather slick interface for manual<br>hunts, made every feature accessible via API for programmatic use cases, and taken an<br>AI-native approach by ensuring our launch comes with a readily-accessible MCP server,<br>allowing our users to interact with our data using their preferred AI agents and/or tools.
Exploring Our Data
Our team has built a series of never-before-seen research tools*, but it’s still going to<br>take good old-fashioned elbow-grease to help folks understand how to explore this data and<br>why it’s critical to get more people involved in this line of work. That is especially true<br>when the very same programmatic advertising systems which power the relatively open Internet<br>we all know and love are (either directly or indirectly) facilitating a wide range of<br>harmful activity, a problem set which has only gotten worse over the last several years.
A non-inclusive list of these harmful activities includes ad tech powering:
global...