Adblocking tools continue to rise in popularity, altering the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy tools for detecting and/or counter-blocking adblockers (tools we refer to as antiadblockers), effectively escalating the online advertising arms race. In this paper, we leverage a novel approach for identifying third-party services shared across multiple websites to present a first characterization of antiadblocking 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.
In REF , the authors study their use on the most popular five thousand websites and find that at least 6.7% of these sites use them.
Ad-Blocking and Counter Blocking: A Slice of the Arms Race
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science