Accounting of Internet advertising in the UIAR (Unified Internet Advertising Registry in the Russian Federation)
Preconditions for the creation of the UIAR: 1.Non-transparency Internet advertisement (there was no possibility to identify ads clients and revenue sources of ads platforms). 2.There was no possibility to verify content of the ad shown on Internet platforms (it is impossible to prove or verify what information was displayed at any time in the ad). 3.Unfair competition between participants of the Internet ads market (there was no possibility to control the placement of advertisement that violated the current legislation on ads placement). Project objectives: 1.Ensure detection (including automatic) and registration of violations in the distribution of Internet advertising among Russian users. 2.Ensure transparency, justification and legality of expenses related to the distribution of Internet advertising. 3.Provide citizens, society and the state with reliable information about the distribution of Internet advertising. Implemented solution: 1.Organizational part. Amendments were made to Federal Law No.38-FZ “On Advertising” and Directive No.1362-r of the Government of the Russian Federation on approvement of the composition of information on distributed Internet advertising to be submitted to Roskomnadzor was issued. A new type of market participant, the Advertisement Data Operator (ADO), was created to collect and transmit data to Roskomnadzor. Operators of advertising networks have made changes to their platforms to display advertising identifiers. 2.Technical part. The Unified Internet Advertising Registry (UIAR) was developed and implemented: an information platform that stores data and provides analytical information to advertising market participants and government agencies. The platform utilizes only open source components and open code created by Russian developers. UIAR has been operational since 01.09.2022 and is available to all citizens and business via https://erir.grfc.ru/,where any advertiser can view information about his advertisement. UIAR provides three main functions: 1)A unified data bank of information on commercial Internet advertising. Information about all advertisement campaigns displayed on the Internet (images, text, audio messages, video) and its metadata is uploaded into a single database. Data quality control tools have been developed. 2)Fast analytics on advertisement data. The UIAR contains information on advertisement distributors, platform's funding sources, state-owned companies advertisement and companies with state participation, advertisement of authorities, and tools for identifying advertisement that violates legislation. Information panels have been developed to objectively assess the capacity of the advertising market. 3)Tools for investigation and analysis for the Federal Tax Service, Federal Antimonopoly Service and Roskomnadzor. Personal accounts of the authorities have been developed, providing tools for investigations and analytics on Internet advertising data.
Artificial Intelligence And Digital Services
Big data storage and analysis
The project of development and implementation of the Unified Internet Advertising Registry (UIAR) was carried out in three stages: 1. Development of a prototype of the UIAR solution and proposals on changes to the legislation of the Russian Federation. From July to November 2021. 2. Development and launch of the first version of the UIAR from February to September 2022. 3. Finalization of the system and launch of the second version from November 2022 to April 2023. During 2023 the system received data on 28 million creatives (advertisement content and design) from users and received more than 9 million contracts from 5 million advertising market participants.
The Unified Internet Advertising Register (UIAR) project was created in Russia by a team of developers from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Voronezh, Belgorod, and Nizhny Novgorod. The system provides service for Internet users in all 89 regions of the Russian Federation. UIAR collects information on all Internet resources (regardless of the location of the website) where advertisement is placed by Russian users.
Prior to the launch of the UIAR system, there was no reliable source of information about the huge Internet advertising market in the country, and approximate estimates based on surveys of market participants and sample measurements were used. The launch of UIAR has made it possible to make fully transparent statistics on Internet advertising in the Russian segment of the Internet, including information on: - advertising content (creative advertising); - advertisers; - sites where advertising is shown; - contracts and money for advertising. The availability of clear information about the advertising market, available to all market participants and government agencies, has led to: - the withdrawal of unscrupulous participants from the market; - an increase in taxes collected from market participants (by 20% in the first year of operation); - a revolutionary shift in the scope and quality of control over the content of advertising for compliance with Russian legislation (prior to the introduction of UIAR, inspections were a one-off and rare event; after the introduction of UIAR, every creative advertising submitted by an advertiser is audited). There are no similar UIAR systems in the world, as well as organizational measures specified in the Russian legislation “On Advertising”. The requirements of the law and the functions of UIAR were developed simultaneously, during the project for the creation and implementation of the system in the period 2021-2022. Due to this, the combination of the information system and legislative procedures is unique. UIAR processes a large amount of data and is a High Load system. It receives data at a rate of up to 30,000 records per second. It stores big data, up to 180 billion records per year (112 Tbytes) and performs sophisticated analytics on this amount of information with a depth of up to 5 years! Real Big Data. At the same time, this system does not depend on other software vendors. It is developed with Open Source components only and open source code written by Russian developers. Therefore, the system can be applied in other countries, taking into account the specifics of the legislation of new countries. UIAR contains popular Open Source systems: - Database Clickhouse (local development) and PostgreSQL; - Zookeeper; - Kafka; - RabbitMQ; - Airflow; - JapserReports. UIAR has a certificate from Rospatent on the state registration of the computer program No. 2023663613 dated June 26, 2023, the copyright holder is the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Main Radio Frequency Center".
1. The Unified Internet Advertising Registry was recognized as “Project of the Year 2023”. The customer of the project received the Global CIO award in the category “Best Industry Solution - National Governance”. https://globalcio.ru/projects/37014/ 2. An article about the project in the largest Russian newspaper Vedomosti with the headline “Roskomnadzor has disclosed the data on Internet advertising budgets submitted to the Unified Registry” is available at https://www.vedomosti.ru/media/articles/2023/02/07/961915-roskomnadzor-raskril-postupayuschie-v-edinii-reestr-dannie. 3. Simple instructions for users: https://rkn.gov.ru/docs/5_shagov_po_uchetu_internet-reklamy_30112023.pdf
There have been no scientific publications on the project experience and progress. However, more than a hundred consultations with developers of well-known Open Source solutions were conducted. The tasks of processing a large number of records (more than 180 billion per year) were solved. The complexity was not just in the large number of records, but also in the need to analyze graphics and video reflecting the content of advertising. The project team is grateful for the help and support of experts in Open Source solutions:DB PostgreSQL 15,DB Clickhouse - v24,Zookeeper 3.8.1,Kafka 3.7.1, RabbitMQ 3.12,Airflow 2.8.3,JasperReports v8,Keycloak 24.0.2,Minio RELEASE 2024-07-11, Redis 7.0.11
