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Comment by Jake232 | Hacker News Reader

I run AdsXposed (https://adsxposed.com) on the side. It's a project that scrapes online ads (specifically popups and redirects) and provides intelligence on them. Which publishers they popped on, which countries, to which devices, etc. It brings in pretty reasonable $$$.

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Would you mind explaining what this does? I am vaguely aware of "advertising networks" but really don't get it enough to grok what you are doing.

How do you know what device an ad appeared on unless the ad is somehow pulling a monitoring .gif from your servers etc? (That's a bit 90s I know)

We scrape hundreds of thousands of publishers who we know run the popup/redirect ads, with IP's from 100 + countries, spoofing hundreds of different mobile devices / orientations / etc. There's a little more magic to it than just those things, but that's the principle.

We see what popups appear, and then record this info and show it in the tool.

I would never have thought of that. Thanks

Congratulations on your success. Curious who is purchasing that kind of info, though..

It's actually super valuable to the affiliates/advertisers purchasing popups. They can look at the competition and get a head start on what works.

It's pulling in low 5 figures/month with very little advertising, so there's definitely a demand for it.

Smart. In that context, I can see the value. If I was going to create an ad campaign or something, I would want to start with a base that I knew was working.

Interesting. I can see how that kind of data is valuable to advertisers. Have you thought about ways to get value from the data about spam ads? The ones that target mobile devices are especially bad these days.

Well, we essentially just sell the data to affiliates, who then get value out of it.

They either copy what their competition is doing, or expand / work on it and use it as a starting point.

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