Title: Ad-blocking: A Study on Performance, Privacy and Counter-measures,
Abstract: Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users
feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the
data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an
impact not only on the loading time of webpages, but also on the internet bill
of the user in some cases. In absence of a mutually-agreed procedure for opting
out of advertisements, many users resort to ad-blocking browser-extensions. In
this work, we study the performance of popular ad-blockers on a large set of
news websites. Moreover, we investigate the benefits of ad-blockers on user
privacy as well as the mechanisms used by websites to counter them. Finally, we
explore the traffic overhead due to the ad-blockers themselves.