research-article

Annoyed Users: Ads and Ad-Block Usage in the Wild

Authors:

Oliver Hohlfeld,

Anja FeldmannAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

Pages 93 - 106

https://doi.org/10.1145/2815675.2815705

Published: 28 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Content and services which are offered for free on the Internet are primarily monetized through online advertisement. This business model relies on the implicit agreement between content providers and users where viewing ads is the price for the "free" content. This status quo is not acceptable to all users, however, as manifested by the rise of ad-blocking plugins which are available for all popular Web browsers. Indeed, ad-blockers have the potential to substantially disrupt the widely established business model of "free" content, currently one of the core elements on which the Web is built.

In this work, we shed light on how users interact with ads. We show how to leverage the functionality of AdBlock Plus, one of the most popular ad-blockers to identify ad traffic from passive network measurements. We complement previous work, which focuses on active measurements, by characterizing ad-traffic in the wild, i.e., as seen in a residential broadband network of a major European ISP. Finally, we assess the prevalence of ad-blockers in this particular network and discuss possible implications for content providers and ISPs.

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Index Terms

Annoyed Users: Ads and Ad-Block Usage in the Wild

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Internet Measurement Conference

October 2015

550 pages

ISBN:9781450338486

DOI:10.1145/2815675

General Chairs:
Kenjiro Cho
IIJ/Keio University
,
Kensuke Fukuda
NII/Sokendai
,
Program Chairs:
Vivek Pai
Google
,
Neil Spring
University of Maryland

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGMETRICS: ACM Special Interest Group on Measurement and Evaluation
SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 October 2015

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IMC '15

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IMC '15: Internet Measurement Conference

October 28 - 30, 2015

Tokyo, Japan

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IMC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 96 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3675400
Ali MSnyder PKanich CHaddadi HLuo BLiao XXu JKirda ELie D(2024)Unbundle-Rewrite-Rebundle: Runtime Detection and Rewriting of Privacy-Harming Code in JavaScript BundlesProceedings of the 2024 on ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3658644.3690262(2192-2206)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3658644.3690262
Roongta RGreenstadt RQuek TGao DZhou JCardenas A(2024)From User Insights to Actionable Metrics: A User-Focused Evaluation of Privacy-Preserving Browser ExtensionsProceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3634737.3657028(1753-1769)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3634737.3657028
Kaushik SSharma TYu YAli AWang YZou Y(2024)Cross-Country Examination of People’s Experience with Targeted Advertising on Social MediaExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650780(1-10)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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Rigou MSirmakessis SPanagiotarou ABalaskas S(2023)Online Ads Annoyance Factors: A Survey of Computer Science StudentsOnline Advertising [Working Title]10.5772/intechopen.110169Online publication date: 23-Feb-2023
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