We investigate adblocking filters and the extent to which websites and advertisers react when their content is impacted by these filters. We collected data daily from the Alexa Top-5000 web sites for 120 days, and from specific sites that newly appeared in filter lists for 140 days. By evaluating how long a filter rule triggers on a website, we can gauge how long it remains effective. We matched websites with both a regular adblocking filter list (EasyList) and with a specialized filter list that targets anti-adblocking logic (Nano Defender). From our data, we observe that the effectiveness of the EasyList adblocking filter decays a modest 0.13\% per day, and after around 80 days seems to stabilize. We found no evidence for any significant decay in effectiveness of the more specialized, but less widely used, anti-adblocking removal filters.
@article{arxiv.1912.06176,
title = {Investigating the effectiveness of web adblockers},
author = {Clayton Drazner and Nikola Đuza and Hugo Jonker and Dan S. Wallach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.06176},
year = {2019}
}