A deep dive into the accuracy of IP Geolocation Databases and its impact on online advertising

The quest for every time more personalized Internet experience relies on the enriched contextual information about each user. Online advertising also follows this approach. Among context that stakeholders leverage, location is certainly one of them. However, when not directly available from end users, infer it using geolocation databases, matching IP addresses to a position earth. accuracy approach has often been questioned in past: however, reality check an stakeholder shows technique accounts large fraction served advertisements. In paper, we revisit work field, mostly almost decade ago, through lenses big data. More specifically, we, i) benchmark two commercial evaluate quality their ground-truth database user positions containing over 2 billion samples, $ii$ ) analyze internals these devising theoretical upper bound approach, and xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$iii$ run empirical study unveils monetary impact technology by considering costs associated with real-world ad impressions dataset.