Kiran Garimella
Michael Mathioudakis
ABSTRACT
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact not only on the loading time of webpages, but also on the internet bill of the user in some cases. In absence of a mutually-agreed procedure for opting out of advertisements, many users resort to ad-blocking browser-extensions.
In this work, we study the performance of popular ad-blockers on a large set of news websites. Moreover, we investigate the benefits of ad-blockers on user privacy as well as the mechanisms used by websites to counter them. Finally, we explore the traffic overhead due to the ad-blockers themselves.
- Paul Barford, Igor Canadi, Darja Krushevskaja, Qiang Ma, and S. Muthukrishnan. 2014. Adscape: Harvesting and analyzing online display ads. In WWW. 597--608. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- David S. Evans. 2008. The economics of the online advertising industry. Review of network economics 7, 3 (2008).Google Scholar
- Marjan Falahrastegar, Hamed Haddadi, Steve Uhlig, and Richard Mortier. 2014. Anatomy of the third-party web tracking ecosystem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1066 (2014).Google Scholar
- Matthew Malloy, Mark McNamara, Aaron Cahn, and Paul Barford. 2016. Ad Blockers: Global Prevalence and Impact. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference. 119--125. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rishab Nithyanand and others. 2016. Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race. arXiv:1605.05077 (2016).Google Scholar
- PageFair. 2015. The 2015 Ad Blocking Report. https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblocking-report/ (2015).Google Scholar
- PageFair. 2016. The 2016 Mobile Ad Blocking Report. https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/ (2016).Google Scholar
- Enric Pujol, Oliver Hohlfeld, and Anja Feldmann. 2015. Annoyed Users: Ads and Ad-Block Usage in the Wild. In IMC. 93--106. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sebastian Schelter and Jérôme Kunegis. 2016. On the Ubiquity of Web Tracking: Insights from a Billion-Page Web Crawl. arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.07403 (2016).Google Scholar
- Robert J. Walls, Eric D. Kilmer, Nathaniel Lageman, and Patrick D. McDaniel. 2015. Measuring the Impact and Perception of Acceptable Advertisements. In IMC. 107--120. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Craig E. Wills and Doruk C. Uzunoglu. 2016. What Ad Blockers Are (and Are Not) Doing. In HotWeb. 72--77.Google Scholar
- Zhonghao Yu, Sam Macbeth, Konark Modi, and Josep M. Pujol. 2016. Tracking the Trackers. In WWW. 121--132. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and Counter-measures
Recommendations
A multidimensional framework of web browsers' trust and distrust of banner advertisements
Past research has explored the effectiveness of banner advertisements and how to increase banner advertisement click-through rates. But there is very little research regarding this question: Why are banner advertisement click-through rates extremely low?...
Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness
We use data from a large-scale field experiment to explore what influences the effectiveness of online advertising. We find that matching an ad to website content and increasing an ad's obtrusiveness independently increase purchase intent. However, in ...
Online advertising on popular children's websites: Structural features and privacy issues
This study examined advertisements placed on popular children's websites. A total of 117 commercial children's websites, 933 unique ads and 813 advertising websites were included in the sample. Results show that a majority of children's websites carried ...
Comments