Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ongoing arms race between adblockers and anti-adblocking mechanisms by analyzing the prevalence, sources, and methods of anti-adblocking scripts on top websites, revealing a significant adoption rate and industry involvement.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable method to identify shared anti-adblocking services and provides the first characterization of anti-adblocking practices on popular websites.

Findings

At least 6.7% of top websites use anti-adblocking scripts.

Identified 12 entities providing anti-adblocking scripts.

Some entities have direct ties to the advertising industry.

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.