Exploring Political Ads on News and Media Websites During the 2024 U.S. Elections

Building on recent work studying content in the online advertising ecosystem, including our own prior study of political ads on the web during the 2020 U.S. elections, we analyze political ad content appearing on websites leading up to and during the 2024 U.S. elections. Crawling a set of 745 news and media websites several times from three different U.S. locations (Atlanta, Seattle, and Los Angeles), we collect a dataset of over 15000 ads, including (at least) 315 political ads, and we analyze it quantitatively and qualitatively. Among our findings: a prevalence of clickbait political news ads, echoing prior work; a seemingly new emphasis (compared to 2020) on voting safety and eligibility ads, particularly in Atlanta; and non-election related political ads around the Israel-Palestine conflict, particularly in Seattle. We join prior work in calling for more oversight and transparency of political-related ads on the web. Our dataset is available at https://ad-archive.cs.washington.edu.