Masters Final Oral: Baskar Gopalakrishnan
Title: CyAds Tracker - Data Acquisitions to Discover Micro-targeted Youtube Video Ads
Date/Time: November 11th, 2016 @ 3:00 PM
Place: 216 Atanasoff
Major Professor: Adisak Sukul
Abstract:
In this project, we propose to develop new tools of collect YouTube video ads. Then in the future work, coding to systematically test theories about how campaigns use online advertising to target voters. In particular, we do the following: 1) Develop a system of “bots” that have different online profiles. These bots will “watch” videos on YouTube, tracking and collecting the advertisements shown. 2) in the future work, we will develop an automated coding scheme for these videos, allowing us to measure the content of the ads shown to the bots and test for how these message vary as a result of the differences in the bots’ profile. The data collected will allow us to understand the strategies campaigns use to target voters online. We pick the most popular political videos in YouTube and then watch those videos with the bots of different profiles. The ad data is extracted from the network traffic by fiddler and subsequently video and image ads are downloaded locally. We also propose an extension that can be attached to the browser and can be used to capture the video and image ads that appear when browsing videos manually. The correctness of the bots with respect to manually watching the videos is evaluated and preliminary resolve from the data we collected is also published.