Assessing Compliance in Digital Advertising: A Deep Dive into Acceptable Ads Standards
Track: Responsible Web
Keywords: Web Measurement, Online Advertisements, Privacy, Fairness, Transparency
TL;DR: This paper analyzes the compliance of online ads with the Acceptable Ads Standards and discovers that one in ten websites display ads that are non-compliant.
Abstract: Online ads are a source of revenue for millions of websites. However, their intrusive and disruptive nature can impact the user experience of site visitors. Specialized tools such as browser extensions have emerged that block such advertisements from displaying. To restore balance in the favor of domain owners who lost revenue due to ad-filtering, online ad standards were defined to strike a middle ground between user choice and monetization. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the compliance of online digital advertisements with the most prevailing ad standard: the Acceptable Ads Standards. We selected 10,000 domains by intersecting Tranco's top 100K domains with the Acceptable Ads exception list. This subset highlights popular sites that are expected to adhere to specific advertising standards. The Acceptable Ads Standards, initiated by the Acceptable Ads Committee, seeks a balance between user experience and ad effectiveness, allowing certain non-intrusive ads defined by size, placement and type limitations. Our research methodology includes a quantitative analysis of ad formats and compliance rates. In this study, we conclude that almost 10\% of the partner websites when crawled with Acceptable Ads' exception list have at-least one non-compliant ad on the landing page. Our analysis also reveals the design flaws in Acceptable Ads Exception list that allows publishers to bypass ad size and format limitations. Leveraging this understanding, we also propose improvements to the exception list that can avoid violating ads from being rendered and ensure user experience of millions of site visitors who rely on Acceptable Ads is improved.
Submission Number: 2312
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