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The exponential growth of the web and its benefits can be attributed largely to its open model where anyone with internet connection can access information on the web for free. This has created unprecedented opportunities for various…
Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid…
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…
Most websites offer their content for free, though this gratuity often comes with a counterpart: personal data is collected to finance these websites by resorting, mostly, to tracking and thus targeted advertising. Cookie walls and…
Despite the advance of the Open Access (OA) movement, most scholarly production can only be accessed through a paywall. We conduct an international survey among researchers (N=3,304) to measure the willingness and motivations to use (or not…
The main contributors of scientific knowledge, researchers, generally aim to disseminate their findings far and wide. And yet, publishing companies have largely kept these findings behind a paywall. With digital publication technology…
Cookie paywalls allow visitors to access the content of a website only after making a choice between paying a fee (paying option) or accepting tracking (cookie option). The practice has been studied in previous research in regard to its…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
Media publisher platforms often face an effectiveness-nuisance tradeoff: more annoying ads can be more effective for some advertisers because of their ability to attract attention, but after attracting viewers' attention, their nuisance to…
A reader browsing through an online article is highly likely to encounter an advertorial, often without realizing it. Advertorials represent a relatively new marketing strategy where advertisements are deliberately designed to resemble the…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
We initiate a systematic study to help distinguish a special group of online users, called hidden paid posters, or termed "Internet water army" in China, from the legitimate ones. On the Internet, the paid posters represent a new type of…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
The rise of cookie paywalls ('pay-or-ok' models) has prompted growing debates around the right to privacy and data protection, monetisation, and the legitimacy of user consent. Despite their increasing use across sectors, limited research…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
The recent proliferation of Electronic Commerce (E-commerce) has been further escalated by multifaceted emerging payment solutions such as cryptocurrencies, mobile, peer-to-peer (P2P) and social media payment platforms. While these…
User facing 'platform safety technology' encompasses an array of tools offered by platforms to help people protect themselves from harm, for example allowing people to report content and unfollow or block other users. These tools are an…
Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and…
Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their…