French news sites are too often poor performers in terms of user experience. The work carried out by the technical teams in order to offer a site that is pleasant to read is frequently ruined by partnerships with unscrupulous advertising intermediaries.
These intermediaries provide little value, but significantly slow down loading times and leak your personal information to numerous third parties. As such, the “reference daily” is a good example: Lemonde.fr works with the “data marketing” company Weborama, let's take a look at how this partnership impacts page load times and your privacy.
Who is Weborama?
Weborama is a French "data marketing" company which has had several lives (created in 1998, formerly offering an audience measurement tool, an ad-network as well as the "slide in" advertising format, close to pop-up), it now provides the following services:
- A DMP (Data Management Platform) : this service allows lemonde.fr to segment its user data and activate these segmentations (for example to be able to sell targeted advertising campaigns, or to buy targeted advertising on other websites). You can have more details on how Lemonde.fr sells advertising campaigns via its commercial presentation (dating from February 2018, the DMP is mentioned on page 11)
- A data provider : Weborama will directly collect your browsing on sites where its scripts are present and purchase personal data from third parties, to then segment you (centers of interest, purchasing intentions). This segmentation will be resold to third parties. We will see below that Weborama takes advantage of its client lemonde.fr to transmit your personal data (= materialize the resale) to numerous third parties.
- An ad network : Weborama offers advertisers the ability to carry out advertising campaigns themselves, the promise being greater efficiency thanks to all the personal data in its possession.
- An advertising server : this service allows large advertisers and agencies to distribute advertising campaigns (generally banners) and measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
The test
We want to zoom in on the first time a user consults a page on lemonde.fr. Follow the following steps:
- Disable your adblocker
- Delete cookies on Chrome (Settings > Advanced settings > Clear browsing data)
- Then go to lemonde.fr
- Open the Chrome console (⌘+Option+J on Mac, Ctrl, Shift and J on PC)
- Go to the “Network” tab and filter the results on weborama
- Scroll on the page (lemonde.fr considers that scrolling constitutes acceptance of cookies, and then triggers advertising tracking)
- In the "Network" tab of the console, look at the requests sent, all related to weborama
The result is edifying:
63 requests out of 422 are linked to the Weborama company alone! These requests considerably slow down the loading time of the site. Note that the information sent to Weborama does not stop at the first page viewed on the Lemonde.fr site, each page loading results in the sending of a minimum of 3 requests to Weborama.
And when we look at the requests in detail, we can see that Weborama transmits your personal data to 27 other companies.
American companies
Here we find 9 companies established in the world of adtech, and working on the French market.
- Nielsen (data provider)
- Doubleclick, now Google Marketing Platform (Google's advertising suite)
- AppNexus (DSP & SSP)
- RadiumOne (DSP)
- Tubemogul (DSP specialized in video)
- MediaMath (DSP)
- Acxiom (data provider)
- TheTradeDesk (DSP specialized in video)
- Yahoo (yes, Yahoo still exists)
French companies
Here we find 5 companies, all known in the world of French adtech.
- Criteo (retarget)
- Smart AdServer (AdServer publisher & SSP)
- ZBO Media, formerly known as Zebestof (DSP)
- Temelio (crosses your personal data online and offline, often thanks to your email)
- Graphinium (allows advertisers who have offline personal data about you to target you on the web, often using your email)
Russian companies
The specificity of Weborama: here we find 12 companies that we are not used to seeing on European or American sites, with a mix between Russian general public sites and marketing companies. Weborama has links with Russia since its choice to invest in a Russian Marketing company in 2012. But it is surprising to see that these links impact French users, why do these Russian companies having no customers in France need your personal data? Is Lemonde.fr aware that it is leaking your personal data to so many Russian companies?
- Mail.ru (email provider)
- Yandex (search engine)
- CleverData (data provider)
- GetIntent (DSP)
- Seedr (video distribution)
- Rambler (portal)
- Relap.io (content recommendation)
- Hot-wifi.ru (public wifi, with advertising included)
- VK.com (social network)
- AdSniper (ad network)
- AdCamp (ad-network video)
- Kost.tv (ad-network video)
Slovenian society
- Zemanta (DSP, acquired by Outbrain)
Conclusions
This partnership raises questions on several levels:
- by the number of third parties to which your personal data leaks
- by the fact that certain third parties (Russians) are unknown
- by the number of additional requests caused by Weborama, degrading the user experience
- Is Lemonde.fr well aware of the cost/benefit ratio of this partnership? The price of online advertising is mainly determined by targeting chosen and carried out by advertisers, not by publishers.
- Does the CNIL intend to look into the world of adtech and put an end to the excesses?
As a user, you have an obvious solution: protect yourself by installing an adblocker