Recently I started working on a project on appgoblin to estimate the number of client apps for all mobile advertising and data collection companies. In doing this there are currently two sources of data: decompiled SDKs of which I have only done ~20k apps and app-ads.txt which I have scraped closer to ~200k apps’ app-ads.txt files. Both have their blind spots. Some apps I have yet to successfully unzip. My processes for opening / unzipping iOS is much less reliable, also once opened it’s not always a guaranteed I can correctly identify whether an app is using specific SDKs.
Still, as I get more and more data, it was my assumption that the two should converge. Yet I have started noticing something interesting. Advertising networks that I would not have thought of as “DIRECT” have been showing up in the app-ads.txt but I am not sure what the related SDKs would be.
The first example is Rubicon which has a massive 50k apps, but I have yet to map it to a specific SDK. Looking through the evidence I have of SDKs, I can’t find any mention of it. I am thinking that rubiconproject.com does not actually have direct SDKs that apps use, but instead partners with existing players like AppLovin or Unity who do have a large number of apps mediation and monetization SDKs. This is a bit odd, because it obfuscates which ad network the programmatic traffic is being bought on.
This will need further investigation to understand what is the correct meaning of “DIRECT” and whether it is being applied correctly here or what other information I might be missing.