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How spy tools work? (4)

09-23-2015 06:57 AM #1 cikatomo (Member)
How spy tools work?

How do they scrape the banners? How do they know how many days the banner is running?
Do they do it by filename or they actually recognize the image?

09-23-2015 03:07 PM #2 blackgoat (Member)

Hey Cikatomo,

If I am not mistaken they use WhatRunsWhere to find all that information out. You can download exact banners straight from there. It'll give you a lot of information that can be used to get it right.

Thanks,
J

09-23-2015 03:19 PM #3 mobile_ad_monitor (Member)

Originally Posted by cikatomo

How do they scrape the banners? How do they know how many days the banner is running?
Do they do it by filename or they actually recognize the image?

We build massive scraping software that goes to websites or apps and identifies the ads on the page (we have a few ways of doing this) and then we have our software download the ads and store them into our database with different information about when they were collected and which placement they came from.

The tricky part these days is the variety of webpages and different types of traps that can stop our tool from working (i.e really large webpages, really long webpages, tons of popups.)

09-23-2015 06:02 PM #4 cikatomo (Member)

Originally Posted by mobile_ad_monitor

Thanks,
So do you store them in database by their actual filename? Just like save as? Or you have image recognition and you know it's the same banner even if the filename is different?

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