Blocking online advertising - A state of the art

Online advertising has emerged as one of the major business models on the Internet. Publishers rely on the online revenue generated from advertising to offer many free services. However, it has become evident that online advertisements are now becoming quite intrusive and also consume a lot of valuable bandwidth to download zero-caching ads and flash or video ads. As a result many users are now using ad-blocking software to make their Internet surfing more enjoyable. The main contribution of this paper is as follows - it attempts to identify the main reasons why internet users want to block online ads; it also critically evaluates several existing ad-blocking techniques and conducts an experiment to measure the amount of bandwidth used by online advertisements relative to the actual content. The paper concludes by outlining future research directions.