PUFFIN: Personal User Floor For Impression Negotiations

"Targeted" or "interest-based", advertising appears to have two key effects
on the web advertising market.

   -

   Additional incremental ad revenue for publisher sites because of
   increased advertiser knowledge of audience composition and willingness to
   pay for an ad impression.
   -

   Leakage of ad revenue from high-engagement, high-reputation sites to
   lower-engagement sites where the same audience appears to be available.

Different sources make different claims about the magnitude of the two
effects (see links from the page below).

In the past, it has been difficult for sites to take advantage of the first
effect without enduring the second. However, today's ongoing process of
moving the advertising market into the browser means that the rules of that
market will be set by the user agent. In many cases the interest of the
user in high-reputation ad-supported content aligns with the interests of
high-reputation ad-supported sites, and the rules of the in-browser market
can be adjusted to reflect that user interest.

PUFFIN is a persistent per-browser floor price that the interest-group ad
bid must also exceeed in order to win an in-browser auction. A PUFFIN is
calculated based on an exponentially weighted rolling average of winning
contextual ad bids. The interest-based ad must beat not only the
highest-bidding contextual ad in the current auction, but also the average
price for contextual ads that have previously appeared in the same browser.

I anticipate that PUFFIN will be one of a family of ad price floor tweaks
that user agents will be able to apply in order to maximize the user's gain
in ad-supported content while minimizing the cost in computing resources
and attention.

https://github.com/dmarti/PUFFIN

Issues and pull requests welcome.