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Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

181 points by __ka 8y ago

itronitron 8y ago
Companies like WP, NYT, and Ars should conduct similar analyses focused on their own sites to see if reducing the number of ads (or their size in pixels or bytes) results in more engagement, and ultimately a larger number of ad views.
- matt4077 8y ago
  There is absolutely no doubt that all those sites, and many others, are continuously running such experiments. There are also new financing methods, paywall implementations, prices, cooperations, etc. being tested all the time, with some successes and many failures. While people here and in general often seem to consider publishers to be rather stupid, I think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that it has become a particularly difficult business, what with almost half of revenue almost instantly disappearing when classifieds move to the net, and people generally considering to appear out of thin air because the costs of copying are zero.
  - gwern 8y ago
    > There is absolutely no doubt that all those sites, and many others, are continuously running such experiments. They are running randomized experiments, but they are not necessarily running the right experiments. If the bottom line is revenue, then attrition may not be directly measured; if they are testing on per page-view or per session instead of bucketing users permanently, then they can miss effects too; and if they are testing by bucketing users simultaneously, they can miss non-additive site-wide effects. If you look at my comment, I link two publicly-documented randomized experiments, and both set up/analyze their tests in an unusual way. After I published my results, I heard about some parallel results, but not that many. I heard whispers that Google might (or might not) have internally run equivalent tests; I heard from Chris Stucchio that an unspecified company he worked for had run an A/B test with similar results; I heard from a mobile developer that they had run a similar experiment but found no effect of ads; Pandora subsequently published their A/B test; and Mozilla has published this. I also read through most of the 'advertising avoidance' literature in academia going back 30 years, and found nothing relevant. And that's it. So, if everyone is always continuously running obviously relevant experiments... where are they?
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Do you mean where are the published results? That's not something publishers do, so most of the intel will be internal. It's also unlikely that are running experiments constantly as the basic stuff has been figured out. Also most of the innovation happens with adtech vendors who try out new ways to get attention and payments. TrueX and Sourcepoint have been working on some new stuff, along with the various formats that keep being invented.
      - gwern 8y ago
        > Do you mean where are the published results? That's not something publishers do Publishers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo do publish many research papers going in depth on A/B tests - such as the effects of page load time - and I've benefited from reading them over the years. So yes, it is something they do.
        manigandham 8y ago
        None of those companies are considered publishers, and that seems to be more generic UX research rather than ad focused. For example, Washington Post runs experiments specifically with ads as a digital media/news publisher, but you won't see that research published anywhere.
        gwern 8y ago
        They publish a ton of stuff and are some of the biggest media properties on the Internet. Other publishers like the NYT or the BBC also do writeups of A/B tests and lessons, but they're such small fry I didn't want to mention them. And if 'page loads harm user retention' is worth publishing, 'ads harm user retention' definitely is and they are exactly the companies best placed to find that out.
        manigandham 8y ago
        We're just going in circles here. You asked about relevant experiments as a reply to comments about media publishers and ads. I'm telling you why you don't see that research as official papers. Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo are not considered media publishers because they are ad networks first. If you just dismiss actual media publishers like NYT and BBC as small fry (when they are some of the biggest) then I'm not sure what you were expecting as an answer. Even if you don't discount their sizes, they do not reveal their research because there's no time or incentive to reveal things like yield management, which is complex, audience specific, and contains competitive intel. That's why it can't be officially found, but you can get details if you talk to their dev teams.
nattaylor 8y ago
If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.
- dmortin 8y ago
  > If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server The problem is the big guys can do this easily, but e.g. someone running a blog cannot easily serve ads from the server. Ad networks are about ad auction and showing the highest paying available ads for a site. Client side ad solutions makes this easy for the little guy, because ad selection is done on the client by the ad network. The big players (facebook, etc.) can easily alter their methods or require subscription if necessary. It's not so easy for the little guy, so a change of the current model without offering a similarly effective alternative is going to kill many little sites, blogs, forums, while the big players will keep thriving regardless.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    If the small players can only continue to exist by serving malvertising, some might opine that they might not have a right to continue to exist with that business model.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Why must non-server advertising be the same as malvertising? The integration type is different from the ads that are possible. Server-side integration doesn't affect what ads are available.
      - crtasm 8y ago
        Don't all the ad networks use JavaScript? Has any network never let malicious code from advertisers slip through? (I guess Google? But I'd prefer not to have even more people embedding their js everywhere I browse)
tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
TL;DR: We find that installing ad blocking extensions substantially increases both active time spent in the browser and the number of pages viewed. (also known as "water is wet")
- bordercases 8y ago
  Water is wet, but to what degree?
amelius 8y ago
> We conclude that ad blocking has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web, suggesting that any costs of using ad blockers to users’ browsing experience are largely drowned out by the utility that they offer. Facebook: "This user isn't clicking any ads; let's keep them engaged more with pointless content until they do."
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Or, "Poor schmucks think they're safe with ad-blockers, but they don't realize our site is 50% native advertising these days". Still, that doesn't cancel out the benefits of ad blocking.
- rfugger 8y ago
  Facebook: "This user isn't clicking any ads, and will probably never click any ads. That's fine; their presence and contribution to the platform helps us attract and retain other users, some of whom will click ads, and so is inherently valuable to us."
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or less for most articles, less than 5c for more serious journalism. Maybe 2 cents/day for social media websites. I would guess for most people in the west 30 dollars/month would be the max they are willing to spend and for other countries, ~5 dollars/month. 3. In return for paying for a page there should be 0 off-site advertisements on the page. 4. People are going to say - such a business model will not work because too many decisions. Look at places like South Asia where hundreds of millions of people use prepaid phone services where they get charged for every call/sms at very low rates. And they would not have it any other way. I am sure consumers in the West can be trained similarly.
- bhauer 8y ago
  If this were sufficiently streamlined, and as you say, part of the browser chrome and not in-page, I feel the same way. I want this, and I know many others do as well. This is essentially what Brave is, as I understand it. But I agree, I'd like an offering from Mozilla in this space because I feel I know and agree with their mission statement and ethics more completely. Other things I'd like: * A small account that is refilled periodically, optionally automatically, like a Starbucks card. * A good UI showing an accounting and summary of my micro payments. * An ability to give more than the asking price, ala Bandcamp and other sites, allowing this to be a mechanism to support content creators one particularly enjoys. * To your first point, an ability to select which information is disclosed by the payment process to the content provider. I should be able to select anything from just the hash/token that proves a payment, to a preferred handle, an email address, a custom message, etc.
- dmortin 8y ago
  This should be adopted by every browser maker for this to work. If we assume it is adopted then there is the issue that somewhere it is stored what sites I visited. It has to be, because it's needed if there is a payment dispute, for example. ("I was charged for that site, but I never visited it.")
gorhill 8y ago
> adblocker | either AdBlock Plus (ABP) or uBlock Origin, the two most popular ad-blocking Firefox add-ons Adblock Plus ("ABP") does not block a lot of ads by default, as ABP's "Acceptable ads" is opt-out -- i.e. it is enabled by default. I wonder if this was taken into account, and if not surely this affected the result of measuring "the effect of ad blocking on user engagement with the web", as you can't categorize ABP's "acceptable ads" as "ad blocking".
- gwern 8y ago
  If many of the 'adblock users' are still being exposed to occasional ads which are 'acceptable', then presumably the true effect of ads is even worse than estimated.
RestlessMind 8y ago
> We find that installing ad blocking extensions substantially increases both active time spent in the browser and the number of pages viewed. This empirical evidence supports the position of ad blocking supporters and refutes the claim that ad blocking will diminish user engagement with the Web. This gives me echos of "thrift paradox" - kind of behavior which is great for you as long as most of the other folks behave otherwise. If a majority of users continue viewing ads and thus provide monetary returns for content creators, then the minority users of ad blockers get a better experience and hence they are more engaged with the web. On the other hand, if everyone starts using ad blockers, then how are content creators going to survive? Probably, a bunch of copycats and click-baiters deserve to perish. But this can also have unintended consequences of niche blogs vanishing and/or paywalls going up and/or survival of only those with some benefactor (Washington Post) or cross-subsidizing business empire (Murdoch). Do we want that kind of future?
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  Small independent creators cannot rely on ads for income already and fund some other way. And so almost all of the websites, except for some thousands of top ones. But those can probably find a way to survive another way. Blocking ads may not actually affect anyone beyond online advertising corporations.
  - jonathansampson 8y ago
    Content creators have been hurting for some time, and it doesn't just impact those who have seen diminished returns. Many have been unable to monetize their content at all (which we see quite often on YouTube, etc). We built Brave Payments (now Brave Rewards) into the Brave browser to _re-monetize_ the web. Each month we give out BAT grants to our desktop users, which fund their favorite online properties (sites, streams, channels, etc). Brave is also standing up an alternative ad-model which requires explicit user consent. If a user participates, ad-matching happens locally, on the user's device. This protects privacy, cuts out middle-men, reduces fraud, and more. Furthermore, the users are compensated for their attention (up to 70% of ad revenue), which adds to the sustainability of the web.
jamesb93 8y ago
I think I would just rather have advertisers barrage me and I'll continue to block them.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  Something has to be done about the sustainability problem though, otherwise you'll have fewer and fewer sites to visit in the future. Brave is working on an alternative digital advertising platform based on explicit user buy-in. If the user does not consent, the user does not see these third party ads and trackers. As part of an incentive to get user consent, Brave's model pays the user for their attention (as much as 70% of ad revenue). After all, attention is a limited commodity, and you should get paid for yours. In the Brave model, ads are matched locally, on the user's device via machine learning. This reduces complexity, thus reducing opportunity for fraud and abuse. As such, we expect to see more revenue for the content creators themselves (in addition to the users).
StavrosK 8y ago
I don't see anyone here pointing out an alternative explanation: It could be simply that more active users are more likely to install ad blockers.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  They seem to cover that: > We then compare test group Web usage after installing the ad blocker to control group usage over a comparable period, controlling for baseline usage levels. Emphasis mine.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Interesting, thanks.
jchw 8y ago
Interesting, but I do want to know if a randomized study produces the same results. Users who use adblockers are much more likely to be power users. Mozilla does control for that by separating any add-on from adblockers, however. So maybe the finding is generally true. This is not very surprising if true, given the difference in experience across most websites when adblocking is on.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  Brave is extending ad-blocking beyond the power-user domain, and into the general user base. We recently passed 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million Android downloads. With our built-in ad-blocking, the practice is becoming more ubiquitous among non-technical users. In fact, prior to Brave, ad-blockers had appeared on more than 600M devices. There's a clear and strong trend towards more and more blocking/privacy-by-default on the web.
downrightmike 8y ago
More people are voting with their wallets that online advertising is executed poorly and an annoyance to a threat vector for malware. More people need to stop the advertising from even coming down their wire. I'm happy with Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  This is what we do with Brave (https://brave.com https://brave.com). We stop it from even touching the network; after all, much of the ads and trackers we download aren't benign. Many are aggressively trying to monitor our online activity at best, or infect us with malware at worst. Brave blocks these requests from taking place. We offer the user an option instead to support online properties (websites, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, etc.) with pro-rata contributions of Attention Token (BAT). Brave stakes users with free BAT grants each month to prime the system. Understanding that the web runs on advertisements, we're also working on an alternative advertising model wherein the user gives explicit consent to participate, matching happens on-device via machine learning, and revenues are shared with the end-user (as much as 70%).
gwern 8y ago
> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads ) of (15% vs my 14%, 13-16% CI). The unit of analysis isn't the same but they're arguably equivalent. This is also interestingly parallel to Pandora's giant A/B test: Huang et al 2018's https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio".
- thomastjeffery 8y ago
  It seems to me like this study is looking at the correlation of heavy usage and ad blocker usage, and jumping to the conclusion that blocking ads is a cause for using the web more, and not the other way around.
  - gwern 8y ago
    It is correlational, yes, but it's consistent with what we expect (surely no one expects ads to have zero or even positive effects on Internet usage?), the direction & size of the effect are consistent with the 2 most relevant randomized experiments (linked in my comment), and they have longitudinal data which lets them control for a decent number of baseline characteristics like, to quote from the propensity scoring section: - Active hours: Total time the user spent interacting with the browser - Session length: Total browser session time - Number of subsessions: Total Telemetry reports - Total tab open events: Number of tabs opened - Total URI count: Total number of pages loaded - Unique URI count: Number of unique websites (TLD+1) visited - Address bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the address bar - Search bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the dedicated search bar - Total Yahoo searches: Number of searches made using the Yahoo search engine - Total Google searches: Number of searches made using the Google search engine - Total searches: Total number of searches overall initiated from one of the Firefox search bars - Number of bookmarks: Total bookmarks added - Length of history: Total number of pages visited So everyone with an adblocker had normal activity levels at the start (compared to the non-adblock-user they are 'matched' with by the propensity scoring), but after installation, then the adblocker people saw large increases in activity that their non-adblock counterparts, who were web browsing just as much before hand, did not experience. This largely rules out the reverse causation of 'browsing -> adblock installation'. It could still be driven by people forecasting that they will be doing a lot of web browsing in the future and installing adblock before they begin doing all the extra browsing, but this feels a lot less plausible to me.
TekMol 8y ago
I smell a Correlation-Is-not-Causation fallacy here.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  Could you elaborate as to why you believe there is no causation here? Those who use ad-blockers do so for the explicit reason of making the web more tolerable; a more tolerable web is therefore more desirable to browse.
  - thomastjeffery 8y ago
    This is proving just as clearly that the more you use a web browser, the more likely it is that you will block ads. The only evidence here is correlation.
    - gwern 8y ago
      > This is proving just as clearly that the more you use a web browser, the more likely it is that you will block ads. No. That's the point of using propensity matching in a longitudinal dataset. What this 'proves' is that 'when two new Firefox users who use a web browser an equal amount (as defined by a number of variables like time-in-browser or total-TLDs or total-URLs) are compared, one of whom installs adblock and one who does not, afterwards, the adblock user subsequently increases their web browser use compared to the non-adblock user'. As they put it: > Restricting to new users who installed Firefox during a specific time period, we select a test group of users who installed an ad blocker, and a control group that did not. The selection is performed using a matching technique applied to baseline user features, which allows us to infer a degree of causality from the observed effects. We then compare test group Web usage after installing the ad blocker to control group usage over a comparable period, controlling for baseline usage levels. This is sometimes referred to as analysis of covariance, and is closely related to difference-in-difference analysis...This is achieved using matching. Each test group member is paired with a similar member of the control group, where similarity is determined based on features observed during the baseline period. This ensures that the groups start off “more or less the same”, e.g. that one group is not biased towards more engaged users...Taking into account the matching and adjustments made to ensure comparability between the groups, we find that installing an ad blocker does in fact have a strong effect on average Web engagement. Users who installed an ad blocker were active in the browser for around 28% more time on average, and loaded 15% more pages (URIs), controlling for baseline activity. (Which of course still doesn't prove causation, because there is 1 remaining possibility: some third factor caused both the adblock installation and then later in time the increased web browsing. But it doesn't prove what you say it does.)
asdf1234tx 8y ago
I don't object to advertising. Highly optimized images can load quickly. I object like a banshee to the insane amounts of js that is raining down on my connection. The bad things that people are doing with that js, from crooked, inept, unprincipled, to down right criminal, well that's just the icing on the cake...
- fliesblackflags 8y ago
  This is why I block nearly all adverts. I wouldn't object to ads that don't track me, or autoplay sound/video, or obscure the content, or waste my bandwidth.

181 points by __ka 8y ago

Companies like WP, NYT, and Ars should conduct similar analyses focused on their own sites to see if reducing the number of ads (or their size in pixels or bytes) results in more engagement, and ultimately a larger number of ad views.

matt4077 8y ago
There is absolutely no doubt that all those sites, and many others, are continuously running such experiments. There are also new financing methods, paywall implementations, prices, cooperations, etc. being tested all the time, with some successes and many failures. While people here and in general often seem to consider publishers to be rather stupid, I think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that it has become a particularly difficult business, what with almost half of revenue almost instantly disappearing when classifieds move to the net, and people generally considering to appear out of thin air because the costs of copying are zero.
- gwern 8y ago
  > There is absolutely no doubt that all those sites, and many others, are continuously running such experiments. They are running randomized experiments, but they are not necessarily running the right experiments. If the bottom line is revenue, then attrition may not be directly measured; if they are testing on per page-view or per session instead of bucketing users permanently, then they can miss effects too; and if they are testing by bucketing users simultaneously, they can miss non-additive site-wide effects. If you look at my comment, I link two publicly-documented randomized experiments, and both set up/analyze their tests in an unusual way. After I published my results, I heard about some parallel results, but not that many. I heard whispers that Google might (or might not) have internally run equivalent tests; I heard from Chris Stucchio that an unspecified company he worked for had run an A/B test with similar results; I heard from a mobile developer that they had run a similar experiment but found no effect of ads; Pandora subsequently published their A/B test; and Mozilla has published this. I also read through most of the 'advertising avoidance' literature in academia going back 30 years, and found nothing relevant. And that's it. So, if everyone is always continuously running obviously relevant experiments... where are they?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Do you mean where are the published results? That's not something publishers do, so most of the intel will be internal. It's also unlikely that are running experiments constantly as the basic stuff has been figured out. Also most of the innovation happens with adtech vendors who try out new ways to get attention and payments. TrueX and Sourcepoint have been working on some new stuff, along with the various formats that keep being invented.
    - gwern 8y ago
      > Do you mean where are the published results? That's not something publishers do Publishers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo do publish many research papers going in depth on A/B tests - such as the effects of page load time - and I've benefited from reading them over the years. So yes, it is something they do.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        None of those companies are considered publishers, and that seems to be more generic UX research rather than ad focused. For example, Washington Post runs experiments specifically with ads as a digital media/news publisher, but you won't see that research published anywhere.
        gwern 8y ago
        They publish a ton of stuff and are some of the biggest media properties on the Internet. Other publishers like the NYT or the BBC also do writeups of A/B tests and lessons, but they're such small fry I didn't want to mention them. And if 'page loads harm user retention' is worth publishing, 'ads harm user retention' definitely is and they are exactly the companies best placed to find that out.
        manigandham 8y ago
        We're just going in circles here. You asked about relevant experiments as a reply to comments about media publishers and ads. I'm telling you why you don't see that research as official papers. Google, Microsoft (Bing), and Yahoo are not considered media publishers because they are ad networks first. If you just dismiss actual media publishers like NYT and BBC as small fry (when they are some of the biggest) then I'm not sure what you were expecting as an answer. Even if you don't discount their sizes, they do not reveal their research because there's no time or incentive to reveal things like yield management, which is complex, audience specific, and contains competitive intel. That's why it can't be officially found, but you can get details if you talk to their dev teams.

nattaylor 8y ago

If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.

dmortin 8y ago
> If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server The problem is the big guys can do this easily, but e.g. someone running a blog cannot easily serve ads from the server. Ad networks are about ad auction and showing the highest paying available ads for a site. Client side ad solutions makes this easy for the little guy, because ad selection is done on the client by the ad network. The big players (facebook, etc.) can easily alter their methods or require subscription if necessary. It's not so easy for the little guy, so a change of the current model without offering a similarly effective alternative is going to kill many little sites, blogs, forums, while the big players will keep thriving regardless.
- Kalium 8y ago
  If the small players can only continue to exist by serving malvertising, some might opine that they might not have a right to continue to exist with that business model.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Why must non-server advertising be the same as malvertising? The integration type is different from the ads that are possible. Server-side integration doesn't affect what ads are available.
    - crtasm 8y ago
      Don't all the ad networks use JavaScript? Has any network never let malicious code from advertisers slip through? (I guess Google? But I'd prefer not to have even more people embedding their js everywhere I browse)

tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago

TL;DR: We find that installing ad blocking extensions substantially increases both active time spent in the browser and the number of pages viewed. (also known as "water is wet")

bordercases 8y ago
Water is wet, but to what degree?

amelius 8y ago

> We conclude that ad blocking has a positive impact on user engagement with the Web, suggesting that any costs of using ad blockers to users’ browsing experience are largely drowned out by the utility that they offer. Facebook: "This user isn't clicking any ads; let's keep them engaged more with pointless content until they do."

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Or, "Poor schmucks think they're safe with ad-blockers, but they don't realize our site is 50% native advertising these days". Still, that doesn't cancel out the benefits of ad blocking.
rfugger 8y ago
Facebook: "This user isn't clicking any ads, and will probably never click any ads. That's fine; their presence and contribution to the platform helps us attract and retain other users, some of whom will click ads, and so is inherently valuable to us."

abdullahkhalids 8y ago

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or less for most articles, less than 5c for more serious journalism. Maybe 2 cents/day for social media websites. I would guess for most people in the west 30 dollars/month would be the max they are willing to spend and for other countries, ~5 dollars/month. 3. In return for paying for a page there should be 0 off-site advertisements on the page. 4. People are going to say - such a business model will not work because too many decisions. Look at places like South Asia where hundreds of millions of people use prepaid phone services where they get charged for every call/sms at very low rates. And they would not have it any other way. I am sure consumers in the West can be trained similarly.

bhauer 8y ago
If this were sufficiently streamlined, and as you say, part of the browser chrome and not in-page, I feel the same way. I want this, and I know many others do as well. This is essentially what Brave is, as I understand it. But I agree, I'd like an offering from Mozilla in this space because I feel I know and agree with their mission statement and ethics more completely. Other things I'd like: * A small account that is refilled periodically, optionally automatically, like a Starbucks card. * A good UI showing an accounting and summary of my micro payments. * An ability to give more than the asking price, ala Bandcamp and other sites, allowing this to be a mechanism to support content creators one particularly enjoys. * To your first point, an ability to select which information is disclosed by the payment process to the content provider. I should be able to select anything from just the hash/token that proves a payment, to a preferred handle, an email address, a custom message, etc.
dmortin 8y ago
This should be adopted by every browser maker for this to work. If we assume it is adopted then there is the issue that somewhere it is stored what sites I visited. It has to be, because it's needed if there is a payment dispute, for example. ("I was charged for that site, but I never visited it.")

gorhill 8y ago

> adblocker | either AdBlock Plus (ABP) or uBlock Origin, the two most popular ad-blocking Firefox add-ons Adblock Plus ("ABP") does not block a lot of ads by default, as ABP's "Acceptable ads" is opt-out -- i.e. it is enabled by default. I wonder if this was taken into account, and if not surely this affected the result of measuring "the effect of ad blocking on user engagement with the web", as you can't categorize ABP's "acceptable ads" as "ad blocking".

gwern 8y ago
If many of the 'adblock users' are still being exposed to occasional ads which are 'acceptable', then presumably the true effect of ads is even worse than estimated.

RestlessMind 8y ago

> We find that installing ad blocking extensions substantially increases both active time spent in the browser and the number of pages viewed. This empirical evidence supports the position of ad blocking supporters and refutes the claim that ad blocking will diminish user engagement with the Web. This gives me echos of "thrift paradox" - kind of behavior which is great for you as long as most of the other folks behave otherwise. If a majority of users continue viewing ads and thus provide monetary returns for content creators, then the minority users of ad blockers get a better experience and hence they are more engaged with the web. On the other hand, if everyone starts using ad blockers, then how are content creators going to survive? Probably, a bunch of copycats and click-baiters deserve to perish. But this can also have unintended consequences of niche blogs vanishing and/or paywalls going up and/or survival of only those with some benefactor (Washington Post) or cross-subsidizing business empire (Murdoch). Do we want that kind of future?

zzzcpan 8y ago
Small independent creators cannot rely on ads for income already and fund some other way. And so almost all of the websites, except for some thousands of top ones. But those can probably find a way to survive another way. Blocking ads may not actually affect anyone beyond online advertising corporations.
- jonathansampson 8y ago
  Content creators have been hurting for some time, and it doesn't just impact those who have seen diminished returns. Many have been unable to monetize their content at all (which we see quite often on YouTube, etc). We built Brave Payments (now Brave Rewards) into the Brave browser to _re-monetize_ the web. Each month we give out BAT grants to our desktop users, which fund their favorite online properties (sites, streams, channels, etc). Brave is also standing up an alternative ad-model which requires explicit user consent. If a user participates, ad-matching happens locally, on the user's device. This protects privacy, cuts out middle-men, reduces fraud, and more. Furthermore, the users are compensated for their attention (up to 70% of ad revenue), which adds to the sustainability of the web.

jamesb93 8y ago

I think I would just rather have advertisers barrage me and I'll continue to block them.

jonathansampson 8y ago
Something has to be done about the sustainability problem though, otherwise you'll have fewer and fewer sites to visit in the future. Brave is working on an alternative digital advertising platform based on explicit user buy-in. If the user does not consent, the user does not see these third party ads and trackers. As part of an incentive to get user consent, Brave's model pays the user for their attention (as much as 70% of ad revenue). After all, attention is a limited commodity, and you should get paid for yours. In the Brave model, ads are matched locally, on the user's device via machine learning. This reduces complexity, thus reducing opportunity for fraud and abuse. As such, we expect to see more revenue for the content creators themselves (in addition to the users).

StavrosK 8y ago

I don't see anyone here pointing out an alternative explanation: It could be simply that more active users are more likely to install ad blockers.

faitswulff 8y ago
They seem to cover that: > We then compare test group Web usage after installing the ad blocker to control group usage over a comparable period, controlling for baseline usage levels. Emphasis mine.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Interesting, thanks.

jchw 8y ago

Interesting, but I do want to know if a randomized study produces the same results. Users who use adblockers are much more likely to be power users. Mozilla does control for that by separating any add-on from adblockers, however. So maybe the finding is generally true. This is not very surprising if true, given the difference in experience across most websites when adblocking is on.

jonathansampson 8y ago
Brave is extending ad-blocking beyond the power-user domain, and into the general user base. We recently passed 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million Android downloads. With our built-in ad-blocking, the practice is becoming more ubiquitous among non-technical users. In fact, prior to Brave, ad-blockers had appeared on more than 600M devices. There's a clear and strong trend towards more and more blocking/privacy-by-default on the web.

downrightmike 8y ago

More people are voting with their wallets that online advertising is executed poorly and an annoyance to a threat vector for malware. More people need to stop the advertising from even coming down their wire. I'm happy with Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net/ https://pi-hole.net/

jonathansampson 8y ago
This is what we do with Brave (https://brave.com https://brave.com). We stop it from even touching the network; after all, much of the ads and trackers we download aren't benign. Many are aggressively trying to monitor our online activity at best, or infect us with malware at worst. Brave blocks these requests from taking place. We offer the user an option instead to support online properties (websites, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, etc.) with pro-rata contributions of Attention Token (BAT). Brave stakes users with free BAT grants each month to prime the system. Understanding that the web runs on advertisements, we're also working on an alternative advertising model wherein the user gives explicit consent to participate, matching happens on-device via machine learning, and revenues are shared with the end-user (as much as 70%).

gwern 8y ago

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( https://www.gwern.net/Ads https://www.gwern.net/Ads ) of (15% vs my 14%, 13-16% CI). The unit of analysis isn't the same but they're arguably equivalent. This is also interestingly parallel to Pandora's giant A/B test: Huang et al 2018's https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio".

thomastjeffery 8y ago
It seems to me like this study is looking at the correlation of heavy usage and ad blocker usage, and jumping to the conclusion that blocking ads is a cause for using the web more, and not the other way around.
- gwern 8y ago
  It is correlational, yes, but it's consistent with what we expect (surely no one expects ads to have zero or even positive effects on Internet usage?), the direction & size of the effect are consistent with the 2 most relevant randomized experiments (linked in my comment), and they have longitudinal data which lets them control for a decent number of baseline characteristics like, to quote from the propensity scoring section: - Active hours: Total time the user spent interacting with the browser - Session length: Total browser session time - Number of subsessions: Total Telemetry reports - Total tab open events: Number of tabs opened - Total URI count: Total number of pages loaded - Unique URI count: Number of unique websites (TLD+1) visited - Address bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the address bar - Search bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the dedicated search bar - Total Yahoo searches: Number of searches made using the Yahoo search engine - Total Google searches: Number of searches made using the Google search engine - Total searches: Total number of searches overall initiated from one of the Firefox search bars - Number of bookmarks: Total bookmarks added - Length of history: Total number of pages visited So everyone with an adblocker had normal activity levels at the start (compared to the non-adblock-user they are 'matched' with by the propensity scoring), but after installation, then the adblocker people saw large increases in activity that their non-adblock counterparts, who were web browsing just as much before hand, did not experience. This largely rules out the reverse causation of 'browsing -> adblock installation'. It could still be driven by people forecasting that they will be doing a lot of web browsing in the future and installing adblock before they begin doing all the extra browsing, but this feels a lot less plausible to me.

TekMol 8y ago

I smell a Correlation-Is-not-Causation fallacy here.

jonathansampson 8y ago
Could you elaborate as to why you believe there is no causation here? Those who use ad-blockers do so for the explicit reason of making the web more tolerable; a more tolerable web is therefore more desirable to browse.
- thomastjeffery 8y ago
  This is proving just as clearly that the more you use a web browser, the more likely it is that you will block ads. The only evidence here is correlation.
  - gwern 8y ago
    > This is proving just as clearly that the more you use a web browser, the more likely it is that you will block ads. No. That's the point of using propensity matching in a longitudinal dataset. What this 'proves' is that 'when two new Firefox users who use a web browser an equal amount (as defined by a number of variables like time-in-browser or total-TLDs or total-URLs) are compared, one of whom installs adblock and one who does not, afterwards, the adblock user subsequently increases their web browser use compared to the non-adblock user'. As they put it: > Restricting to new users who installed Firefox during a specific time period, we select a test group of users who installed an ad blocker, and a control group that did not. The selection is performed using a matching technique applied to baseline user features, which allows us to infer a degree of causality from the observed effects. We then compare test group Web usage after installing the ad blocker to control group usage over a comparable period, controlling for baseline usage levels. This is sometimes referred to as analysis of covariance, and is closely related to difference-in-difference analysis...This is achieved using matching. Each test group member is paired with a similar member of the control group, where similarity is determined based on features observed during the baseline period. This ensures that the groups start off “more or less the same”, e.g. that one group is not biased towards more engaged users...Taking into account the matching and adjustments made to ensure comparability between the groups, we find that installing an ad blocker does in fact have a strong effect on average Web engagement. Users who installed an ad blocker were active in the browser for around 28% more time on average, and loaded 15% more pages (URIs), controlling for baseline activity. (Which of course still doesn't prove causation, because there is 1 remaining possibility: some third factor caused both the adblock installation and then later in time the increased web browsing. But it doesn't prove what you say it does.)

asdf1234tx 8y ago

I don't object to advertising. Highly optimized images can load quickly. I object like a banshee to the insane amounts of js that is raining down on my connection. The bad things that people are doing with that js, from crooked, inept, unprincipled, to down right criminal, well that's just the icing on the cake...

fliesblackflags 8y ago
This is why I block nearly all adverts. I wouldn't object to ads that don't track me, or autoplay sound/video, or obscure the content, or waste my bandwidth.