Digital advertising has a meaningful carbon footprint, largely from the electricity used by the millions of servers that provide search results, news feeds, multiplayer games, real-time bidding, machine learning, and the myriad other functions of the internet we use every day. This carbon footprint varies widely across platforms and publishers, formats and channels, by geography and vendor.
Scope3 provides an accurate, comprehensive, and independent model of the emissions of every company in the digital advertising ecosystem. We build this model by gathering data from as many of the participants in the supply chain as possible.
For publishers, we start with public data (primarily sustainability reports), then enhance with data from various sources (employee counts from LinkedIn, ad calls from web scrapers, ad tech vendors from ads.txt and sellers.json). We then survey companies to confirm what we know and to get more detail on their server-side configuration.
For tech companies, we go deeper, partnering with tech and product leaders to walk through the lifecycle of an ad call and the underlying technical infrastructure, pulling in reports from cloud and datacenter providers to get accurate energy and emissions data.
Our data has multiple applications for companies in the digital advertising space:
