A field study on the impact of the counter ad-blocking wall strategy on user engagement

Ad-blocking tools prevent ads from being shown to web users. Their increasingly widespread usage poses an existential risk to online publishers who provide free content and rely on display ads for revenue. Studies on counter ad-blocking strategies taken by publishers are limited, especially with regard to how these strategies affect user engagement, thus posing additional uncertainties to the selection of a suitable counter ad-blocking strategy. Through a randomized field experiment with a large global publisher, our study seeks to understand how the two most common counter ad-blocking strategies, (i) Wall and (ii) Acceptable Ads Exchange (AAX), affect user engagement differently. Our results show that the Wall strategy causes a lower overall engagement compared to AAX, mainly due to users who refuse to whitelist and leave the website. Over time, the negative impact increases, albeit at a slower speed. Furthermore, heavier users, identified based on the amount of engagement in the pre-treatment period, are less affected by the Wall strategy than lighter users; instrumental users, who read for practical purposes, are less affected than entertainment users. Finally, the Wall strategy has a bigger negative impact on the engagement of popular and new articles, compared to niche and old articles, respectively, as observed by a longer tail in engagement distribution with respect to content. These results on the heterogeneous effects of counter ad-blocking strategies on engagement offer novel and important managerial implications on a publisher's choice of counter ad-blocking strategy and editorial decisions.