AdTech is the primary business model of the data economy ecosystem or, in other words, the “money making machine that fuels the Internet”. In 2021, the global ad spending across platforms reached $763.2 billion, and it is expected to rise 10% in 2022. Moreover, in 2020, 97.9% of Facebook’s and 80% of Google’s global revenue was generated from advertising, and, excluding China, these companies, together with Amazon, will dominate 80% to 90% of the market in 2022. Yet, despite the extraordinary importance of AdTech within the global economy, its methods and processes are extremely opaque, and thus incredibly difficult to control and regulate. [...] The investigation identified more than 21 million cookies per single visit to the landing page of all these websites, belonging to more than 1200 different companies, which translates to an average traffic of 197 trillion cookies per month, resulting in 11,442 monthly metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. It’s important to understand that this number reflects browser-based cookie traffic and does not include app tracking activity, so we estimate this number to be dramatically higher. [...] # Highlights [1] The carbon costs of the tracking cookie ecosystem from the top one million websites have been measured for the first time. [2] The top one million websites contain a total of 21,805,649 cookies. [3] Cookies are sent around over 198 trillion times per month. [4] The most installed cookie in our sample list is _ga (Google Analytics), found on over 534 thousand sites. [5] The first thousand cookies (the top 0.018%), by the number of sites they are installed on, cause a stunning 50% of all the emissions, and the top 1% of cookies (a little over 53 thousand) corresponds to 82% of emissions. [...] # Conclusions In any case, cookie-based tracking technologies are not the only solution available to advertisers today – complex fingerprinting, for instance, can provide the exact same amount of information. On the other hand, behavioural advertising as a whole is under scrutiny not just because of privacy or (newly raised) environmental concerns, but also simply because there is evidence that it might not be as beneficial for publishers as it is for advertisers. Continua su https://carbolytics.org/report.html Giacomo