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

&gt; 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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x2F;B test ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Ads" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Ads</a> ) of (15% vs my 14%, 13-16% CI). The unit of analysis isn&#x27;t the same but they&#x27;re arguably equivalent.<p>This is also interestingly parallel to Pandora&#x27;s giant A&#x2F;B test: Huang et al 2018&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidreiley.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;davidreiley.com&#x2F;papers&#x2F;PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd...</a> &quot;Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio&quot;.

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.<p>This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.

&gt; adblocker | either AdBlock Plus (ABP) or uBlock Origin, the two most popular ad-blocking Firefox add-ons<p>Adblock Plus (&quot;ABP&quot;) does not block a lot of ads by default, as ABP&#x27;s &quot;Acceptable ads&quot; is opt-out -- i.e. it is enabled by default.<p>I wonder if this was taken into account, and if not surely this affected the result of measuring &quot;the effect of ad blocking on user engagement with the web&quot;, as you can&#x27;t categorize ABP&#x27;s &quot;acceptable ads&quot; as &quot;ad blocking&quot;.

&gt; 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.<p>Facebook: &quot;This user isn&#x27;t clicking any ads; let&#x27;s keep them engaged more with pointless content until they do.&quot;

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.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s just the icing on the cake...

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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;day for social media websites. I would guess for most people in the west 30 dollars&#x2F;month would be the max they are willing to spend and for other countries, ~5 dollars&#x2F;month.<p>3. In return for paying for a page there should be 0 off-site advertisements on the page.<p>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&#x2F;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.

I don&#x27;t see anyone here pointing out an alternative explanation: It could be simply that more active users are more likely to install ad blockers.

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.<p>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.

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&#x27;m happy with Pi-hole: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pi-hole.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pi-hole.net&#x2F;</a>

I think I would just rather have advertisers barrage me and I&#x27;ll continue to block them.

&gt; 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.<p>This gives me echos of &quot;thrift paradox&quot; - 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.<p>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&#x2F;or paywalls going up and&#x2F;or survival of only those with some benefactor (Washington Post) or cross-subsidizing business empire (Murdoch). Do we want that kind of future?

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

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