Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and Counter-measures

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance, privacy benefits, and counter-measures of ad-blockers on news websites, highlighting their impact on webpage loading times, user privacy, and traffic overhead.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of popular ad-blockers' effectiveness, privacy advantages, and the counter-measures employed by websites to bypass them.

Findings

Ad-blockers significantly reduce webpage loading times.

They enhance user privacy by blocking trackers.

Websites implement counter-measures to detect and bypass ad-blockers.

Abstract

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 not only on the loading time of webpages, but also on the internet bill of the user in some cases. In absence of a mutually-agreed procedure for opting out of advertisements, many users resort to ad-blocking browser-extensions. In this work, we study the performance of popular ad-blockers on a large set of news websites. Moreover, we investigate the benefits of ad-blockers on user privacy as well as the mechanisms used by websites to counter them. Finally, we explore the traffic overhead due to the ad-blockers themselves.