An Ad-Driven Measurement Technique for Monitoring the Browser Marketplace

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel active measurement methodology for monitoring the browser market landscape. It leverages the display ads delivered through online advertising campaigns to collect the browser brand and version of the device receiving the ad. While providing a similar accuracy to traditional techniques based on passive measurements, our methodology offers some advantages: (i) a lower entry barrier for researchers and practitioners interested in measuring the browser marketplace; (ii) it allows targeted measurements, which can be useful to fix biases in the data sample or to analyze specific aspects of the browser market. We analyze the performance, accuracy, and capabilities of our methodology through real experiments that overall produced more than 6M measurements.