The Research: The study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the City University of Hong Kong sought to determine the effect of ad blockers on websites’ ability to generate revenue and on users’ experiences.
Why it Matters:
- The use of software that blocks ads has surged in recent years, presenting a challenge to platforms that depend on ad revenue.
- These findings have implications for how online platforms make decisions about advertising.
The Takeaways:
- It found that adblockers can make the market more efficient by filtering users who are sensitive to ads, allowing websites to target more intense ads to other users.
- User experience was improved by creating an ad-free experience for certain users while also improving website quality.
- Increased ad industry regulation by motivating advertising platforms to pay a fee to ad-blocking companies to be included on a list of those allowed past the blocker.
What was said:
- “Our study has implications for platforms dependent on ad revenue, providing general guidelines regarding how they should proceed with decisions about advertising” according to Stylianos Despotakis, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the City University of Hong Kong, who co-authored the study.
- “For example, if a website has users who are generally sensitive to ads, then its platform cannot expect to receive a lot of ad revenue, even when it prevents the use of ad blockers. By allowing ad blockers, both the platform and the users can benefit.”
