Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race
Abstract
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for detecting and/or counter-blocking adblockers (which we refer to as anti-adblockers), effectively escalating the online advertising arms race. In this paper, we develop a scalable approach for identifying third-party services shared across multiple web-sites and use it to provide a first characterization of anti-adblocking across the Alexa Top-5K websites. We map websites that perform anti-adblocking as well as the entities that provide anti-adblocking scripts. We study the modus operandi of these scripts and their impact on popular adblockers. We find that at least 6.7% of websites in the Alexa Top-5K use anti-adblocking scripts, acquired from 12 distinct entities -- some of which have a direct interest in nourishing the online advertising industry.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1605.05077,
title = {Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race},
author = {Rishab Nithyanand and Sheharbano Khattak and Mobin Javed and Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez and Marjan Falahrastegar and Julia E. Powles and Emiliano De Cristofaro and Hamed Haddadi and Steven J. Murdoch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.05077},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
To appear in the Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 2016)