Investigating the effectiveness of web adblockers

12/12/2019

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by   Clayton Drazner, et al.

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We investigate adblocking filters and the extent to which websites and advertisers react when their content is impacted by these filters. We collected data daily from the Alexa Top-5000 web sites for 120 days, and from specific sites that newly appeared in filter lists for 140 days. By evaluating how long a filter rule triggers on a website, we can gauge how long it remains effective. We matched websites with both a regular adblocking filter list (EasyList) and with a specialized filter list that targets anti-adblocking logic (Nano Defender). From our data, we observe that the effectiveness of the EasyList adblocking filter decays a modest 0.13% per day, and after around 80 days seems to stabilize. We found no evidence for any significant decay in effectiveness of the more specialized, but less widely used, anti-adblocking removal filters.