Block the blocker: Studying the effects of Anti Ad-blocking (2001.09434v1)

Abstract: Advertisements generate huge chunks of revenues for websites and online businesses. Ad-blocker and tracker blocking programs have gained momentum in the last few years with massive debates raging on privacy concerns and improving user experience online. Acceptable Ads programme and Anti Ad-blockers are primary elements emerging in recent years that combat ad-blockers. In this paper, we discuss at length data collection of top websites in the world, Germany, DACH region and news category. We generate feature based A/B testing metrics and employ classifier evaluations on them along with then analysing the result. Our paper also discusses how Anti Ad-blockers impact the economic, legal and ethical usage in Germany along with the recent changes in GDPR while taking a look at Acceptable ads programme and Whitelisting.