NAI - (Network Advertising Initiative)

A cooperative group of network advertisers which has developed a set of privacy principles in conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission. The NAI provides consumers with explanations of Internet advertising practices and how they affect both consumers and the Internet. See networkadvertising.org for more information.

Video Ads

In-Banner Video Ads

Leverage the banner space to deliver a video experience as opposed to another static or rich media format. The format relies on the existence of display ad inventory on the page for its delivery

In-Page Video Ads

Delivered most often as a stand alone video ad and do not generally have other content associated with them. This format is typically home page or channel based and depends on real estate within the page dedicated for the video player.


In-Stream Video Ads


Played before, during or after the streaming video content that the consumer has requested. These ads cannot typically be stopped from being played (particularly with pre-roll). This format is frequently used to monetize the video content that the publisher is delivering. In-Stream ads can be played inside short or long form video and rely on video content for their delivery. There are four different types of video content where in-stream may play, UGC (User Generated Content/Video), Syndicated, Sourced and Journalistic.

In-Text Video Ads

Delivered from highlighted words and phrases within the text of web content. The ads are user activated and delivered only when a user chooses to move their mouse over a relevant word or phrase.

Cache busting

The process by which sites or servers serve content or HTML in such a manner as to minimize or prevent browsers or proxies from serving content from their cache. This forces the user or proxy to fetch a fresh copy for each request. Among other reasons, cache busting is used to provide a more accurate count of the number of requests from users.

What is Cache?

Memory used to temporarily store the most frequently requested content/files/pages in order to speed its delivery to the user. Caches can be local (i.e. on a browser) or on a network. In the case of local cache, most computers have both memory (RAM), and disk (hard drive) cache.

Behavioral targeting

Using previous online user activity (e.g., pages visited, content viewed, searches, clicks and purchases) to generate a segment which is used to match advertising creative to users (sometimes also called Behavioral Profiling, Interest-based Advertising, or online behavioral advertising). Behavioral targeting uses anonymous, non-PII data.

What is the Web crawler?

A web crawler (also known as an automatic indexer, bot, Web spider, Web robot) is a software program which visits Web pages in a methodical, automated manner.

This process is called Web crawling or spidering, and the resulting data is used for various purposes, including building indexes for search engines, validating that ads are being displayed in the appropriate context, and detecting malicious code on compromised web servers.

Many web crawlers will politely identify themselves via their user-agent string, which provides a reliable way of excluding a significant amount of non-human traffic from advertising metrics. The IAB (in conjunction with ABCe) maintains a list of known user-agent strings as the Spiders and Bots list. However, those web crawlers attempting to discover malicious code often must attempt to appear to be human traffic, which requires secondary, behavioral filtering to detect.

Most web crawlers will respect a file called robots.txt, hosted in the root of a web site. This file informs the web crawler which directories should and shouldn't be indexed, but does not enact any actual access restrictions.

Technically, a web crawler is a specific type of bot, or software agent.