ADM+S WORKING - PAPER SERIES - The Australian Ad Observatory

Participant sign-up over time for the first year of the project, indicating the date of the first observation made by a participant after successfully installing the plugin Note: The total is around two thirds of the total sign-up of 2021 participants given that one third of participants never made a data donation. [...] The timing of sign-ups to the project strongly coincided with the publication of a series of articles referring explicitly to the project on the ABC News website. [...] As the main and most effective referral point for the project was the ABC’s coverage in April and May 2022, the audience demographics that we observe in our Ad Observatory participant population largely reflect the population characteristics of the ABC. [...] As demonstrated in Figure 15, the frequency of observations varies throughout the year, with the highest volume of observations occurring during the peak of the sign-up activity in May 2022, approaching the Australian Federal Election. [...] Of the total observations during 2022, a simple count of the media objects used in the ads captured reveals that 30% of the observations included a video, either as part of a carousel or as a standalone media object (see Figure 16).