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The Value of First Impressions

The Impact of Ad-Blocking on Web QoE

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 11419))

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Abstract

We present the first detailed analysis of ad-blocking’s impact on user Web quality of experience (QoE). We use the most popular web-based ad-blocker to capture the impact of ad-blocking on QoE for the top Alexa 5,000 websites. We find that ad-blocking reduces the number of objects loaded by 15% in the median case, and that this reduction translates into a 12.5% improvement on page load time (PLT) and a slight worsening of time to first paint (TTFP) of 6.54%. We show the complex relationship between ad-blocking and quality of experience - despite the clear improvements to PLT in the average case, for the bottom 10 percentile, this improvement comes at the cost of a slowdown on the initial responsiveness of websites, with a 19% increase to TTFP. To understand the relative importance of this trade-off on user experience, we run a large, crowd-sourced experiment with 1,000 users in Amazon Turk. For this experiment, users were presented with websites for which ad-blocking results in both, a reduction of PLT and a significant increase in TTFP. We find, surprisingly, 71.5% of the time users show a clear preference for faster first paint over faster page load times, hinting at the importance of first impressions on web QoE.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/AdQoE.

  2. 2.

    https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest.

  3. 3.

    The newest version able to work with WebPageTest.

  4. 4.

    We excluded SpeedIndex results for space considerations; these results were consistent with other findings.

  5. 5.

    https://www.mturk.com.

  6. 6.

    adblock.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    James Newman & Fabián E. Bustamante

Authors
  1. James Newman
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  2. Fabián E. Bustamante
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Correspondence to James Newman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    David Choffnes

  2. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

    Marinho Barcellos

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Newman, J., Bustamante, F.E. (2019). The Value of First Impressions. In: Choffnes, D., Barcellos, M. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15985-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15986-3

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