Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Online ads provide essential revenue for millions of websites but often disrupt user experience.To address this, browser extensions emerged to block intrusive ads, prompting the creation of the Acceptable Ads Standards to balance user choice and monetization.The Acceptable Ads Standards, initiated by the Acceptable Ads Committee, seek a balance between user experience and ad effectiveness, allowing certain non-intrusive ads defined by size, placement, and type limitations.This paper analyzes the compliance of digital advertisements with the Acceptable Ads standards by examining 10,000 popular domains intersecting Tranco's top 100K and the Acceptable Ads exception list.Our findings reveal that nearly 10% of these sites display non-compliant ads on landing pages, exposing design flaws in the exception list that allow publishers to bypass size and format restrictions.We propose enhancements to the exception list to better uphold user experience and ad integrity.
Authors: Ahsan Zafar, Anupam Das
Institution: North Carolina State University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4409657388