Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race
This addresses the escalating arms race in online advertising for publishers and adblock users, but it is incremental as it provides a first characterization rather than a new solution.
The paper tackled the problem of characterizing anti-adblocking mechanisms used by websites to counter adblockers, finding that at least 6.7% of Alexa Top-5K websites employ such scripts from 12 distinct entities.
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.