A survey of the role of viewability within the online advertising ecosystem

© 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Within the online advertising ecosystem, viewability is defined as the metric that measures if an ad impression had the chance of being viewable by a potential consumer. Although this metric has been presented as a potential game-changer within the ad industry, it has not been fully adopted by the stakeholders, mainly due to disagreement between the different parties on the standards to implement and measure it, and its potential benefits and drawbacks. In this study, we present a survey of the role that viewability can have on the main challenges of the online advertising ecosystem depicting the main applications, benefits and issues. With this objective, we provide an overall picture of how viewability can fit within the ecosystem, which can help the different stakeholders to work on its adoption, integration and establishing a research agenda.This work was supported by the Plan de Doctorados Industriales de la Secretaría de Universidades e Investigación del Departamento de Empresa y Conocimiento de la Generalitat de Catalunya under the Grant 2018-DI-059 and by ExoClick. Furthermore, this work received support from the Fellowship through ‘‘la Caixa’’ Foundation under Grant ID100010434, from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant under Agreement 847648, from the Fellowship under Grant CF/BQ/PR20/11770009, from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through Juan de la Cierva Formación Program under Grant FJCI-2017-34926 and from the Spanish Government under Grant PID2020-113795RB-C31 ‘‘COMPROMISE’’.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version