research paper on website blocker

Tepper School of Business

Ad Blockers Could Benefit Websites, Users, and the Market

Ad blockers may offer some benefits to companies, users, and the market..

Millions of websites, including some of the largest Internet companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo), depend on advertising as their main source of revenue, allowing them to offer their content for free. The use of software that blocks ads has surged in recent years, presenting a challenge to platforms that depend on ad revenue.

What is an Ad Blocker?

An ad blocker is a type of software, usually added by a user as an extension to an Internet browser, that prevents ads from appearing on the browsed webpages.

When a user with an ad blocker visits a website with ads, the blocker identifies the ad content and prevents it from loading — as a result, the website does not receive ad revenue for that user.

Ad Blockers Could Benefit Companies

A recent study sought to determine the effect of ad blockers on websites’ ability to generate revenue and on users’ experiences. The study found that contrary to common assumptions, ad blockers may offer some benefits to companies, users, and the market at large. The findings have implications for how online platforms make decisions about advertising.

The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the City University of Hong Kong, appears in Management Science.

“While most speculations point to a grim outlook for advertisers and platforms as a result of ad blockers, the results of our study offer a glimmer of hope by arguing that ad blockers could actually benefit companies,” suggests Kannan Srinivasan, Professor of Management, Marketing, and Business Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study.

Four Ways Ad Blockers Could Be Helpful

Researchers devised an analytical model to assess the effects of ad blockers by modeling competition, the rate of advertising, and users’ sensitivity to advertising. The authors identified two classes of users: one that is more sensitive to ads and uses ad blockers and one that does not use ad blockers. Based on the prevailing conditions, each platform had three options to manage the potential use of ad blockers by some users:

• Ban ad blocking : Continue displaying ads and ban ad blocking. If a viewer used an ad blocker, he or she has to disable it to gain access to the site.
• Allow ad blocking: Continue to display ads and allow ad-blocking software by any user who installs it.
• Charge fees for ad blocking : Stop displaying ads and offer only an ad-free site with a subscription fee.

Based on their work, the researchers concluded that ad blockers may be helpful in one of four ways:

• They can make the market more efficient by filtering users who are sensitive to general ads, allowing websites to target more intense ads to the rest of the users.
• They benefit users by allowing the removal of ads that annoy them.
• They help regulate the ad industry by motivating the advertising platform to pay a fee to the ad-blocking company to include it in a list of ads that are allowed past the blocker.
• A more efficient market can boost the quality of websites’ content, which also benefits users.

Implications of Ad Blockers for Platforms Dependent on Ad Revenue

“Our study has implications for platforms dependent on ad revenue, providing general guidelines regarding how they should proceed with decisions about advertising,” according to Stylianos Despotakis, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the City University of Hong Kong, who co-authored the study.

“For example, if a website has users who are generally sensitive to ads, then its platform cannot expect to receive a lot of ad revenue, even when it prevents the use of ad blockers. By allowing ad blockers, both the platform and the users can benefit.”

R. Ravi, Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and a coauthor of the study, adds “To estimate users’ ad sensitivities, platforms can do tests under differing conditions to decide the ideal course of action to manage ad blocking.”

Summarized from an article in Management Science, The Beneficial Effects of Ad Blockers by Despotakis, S (City University of Hong Kong), Ravi, R (Carnegie Mellon University), and Srinivasan, K (Carnegie Mellon University). Copyright 2020. All rights reserved.

“While most speculations point to a grim outlook for advertisers and platforms as a result of ad blockers, the results of our study offer a glimmer of hope by arguing that ad blockers could actually benefit companies.” 

Kannan Srinivasan  Professor of Management, Marketing, and Business Technologies Study Coauthor

R. Ravi   Professor of Operations Research and Computer Science Study Coauthor

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• 27 March 2024

Tweeting your research paper boosts engagement but not citations

• Bianca Nogrady

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Even before complaints about X’s declining quality, posting a paper on the social-media platform did not lead to a boost in citations. Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty

Posting about a research paper on social-media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) doesn’t translate into a bump in citations, according to a study that looked at 550 papers.

The finding comes as scientists are moving away from the platform in the wake of changes after its 2022 purchase by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

An international group of 11 researchers, who by the end of the experiment had between them nearly 230,000 followers on X, examined whether there was evidence that posting about a paper would increase its citation rate.

“There certainly is a correlation, and that’s been found in a lot of papers. But very few people have ever looked to see whether there’s any experimental causation,” says Trevor Branch, a marine ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead author on the paper, published in PLoS ONE last week 1 .

Every month for ten months, each researcher was allocated a randomly selected primary research article or review from a journal of their choice to post about on their personal account. Four randomly chosen articles from the same edition of the journal served as controls, which the researchers did not post about. They conducted the experiment in the period before Elon Musk took ownership of what was then known as Twitter and complaints of its declining quality increased.

‘Nail in the coffin’

Three years after the initial posts, the team compared the citation rates for the 110 posted articles with those of the 440 control articles, and found no significant difference. The researchers did acknowledge that their followers might not have been numerous enough to detect a statistically significant effect on citations.

The rate of daily downloads for the posted papers was nearly fourfold higher on the day that they were shared, compared with controls. Shared papers also had significantly higher accumulated Altmetric scores both 30 days and three years after the initial post. Calculated by London-based technology company Digital Science, an Altmetric score, says Branch, is a measure of how many people have looked at a paper and are talking about it, but it’s not a reliable indicator of a paper’s scientific worth. “It’s thoroughly biased by how many people with large followings tweet about it,” he says.

The findings echo those of information scientist Stefanie Haustein at the University of Ottawa, whose 2013 study 2 found a low correlation between posts and citations.

Haustein says the problem with using posts as a metric is that, even a decade ago, there was a lot of noise in the signal.

“We actually showed that a lot of the counts on Twitter you would get were bots, it wasn’t even humans,” says Haustein, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

She says the more recent departure of scientists from the platform has been the final nail in the coffin of the idea that posting could increase citations.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00922-y

Branch, T. A. et al. PLoS ONE 19 , e0292201 (2024).

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Haustein, S., Peters, I., Sugimoto, C. R., Thelwall, M. & Larivière, V. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 65, 656–669 (2014).

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More Studies by Columbia Cancer Researchers Are Retracted

The studies, pulled because of copied data, illustrate the sluggishness of scientific publishers to address serious errors, experts said.

By Benjamin Mueller

Scientists in a prominent cancer lab at Columbia University have now had four studies retracted and a stern note added to a fifth accusing it of “severe abuse of the scientific publishing system,” the latest fallout from research misconduct allegations recently leveled against several leading cancer scientists.

A scientific sleuth in Britain last year uncovered discrepancies in data published by the Columbia lab, including the reuse of photos and other images across different papers. The New York Times reported last month that a medical journal in 2022 had quietly taken down a stomach cancer study by the researchers after an internal inquiry by the journal found ethics violations.

Despite that study’s removal, the researchers — Dr. Sam Yoon, chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University’s medical center, and Changhwan Yoon, a more junior biologist there — continued publishing studies with suspicious data. Since 2008, the two scientists have collaborated with other researchers on 26 articles that the sleuth, Sholto David, publicly flagged for misrepresenting experiments’ results.

One of those articles was retracted last month after The Times asked publishers about the allegations. In recent weeks, medical journals have retracted three additional studies, which described new strategies for treating cancers of the stomach, head and neck. Other labs had cited the articles in roughly 90 papers.

A major scientific publisher also appended a blunt note to the article that it had originally taken down without explanation in 2022. “This reuse (and in part, misrepresentation) of data without appropriate attribution represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system,” it said .

Still, those measures addressed only a small fraction of the lab’s suspect papers. Experts said the episode illustrated not only the extent of unreliable research by top labs, but also the tendency of scientific publishers to respond slowly, if at all, to significant problems once they are detected. As a result, other labs keep relying on questionable work as they pour federal research money into studies, allowing errors to accumulate in the scientific record.

“For every one paper that is retracted, there are probably 10 that should be,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, which keeps a database of 47,000-plus retracted studies. “Journals are not particularly interested in correcting the record.”

Columbia’s medical center declined to comment on allegations facing Dr. Yoon’s lab. It said the two scientists remained at Columbia and the hospital “is fully committed to upholding the highest standards of ethics and to rigorously maintaining the integrity of our research.”

The lab’s web page was recently taken offline. Columbia declined to say why. Neither Dr. Yoon nor Changhwan Yoon could be reached for comment. (They are not related.)

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where the scientists worked when much of the research was done, is investigating their work.

The Columbia scientists’ retractions come amid growing attention to the suspicious data that undergirds some medical research. Since late February, medical journals have retracted seven papers by scientists at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute . That followed investigations into data problems publicized by Dr. David , an independent molecular biologist who looks for irregularities in published images of cells, tumors and mice, sometimes with help from A.I. software.

The spate of misconduct allegations has drawn attention to the pressures on academic scientists — even those, like Dr. Yoon, who also work as doctors — to produce heaps of research.

Strong images of experiments’ results are often needed for those studies. Publishing them helps scientists win prestigious academic appointments and attract federal research grants that can pay dividends for themselves and their universities.

Dr. Yoon, a robotic surgery specialist noted for his treatment of stomach cancers, has helped bring in nearly $5 million in federal research money over his career.

The latest retractions from his lab included articles from 2020 and 2021 that Dr. David said contained glaring irregularities . Their results appeared to include identical images of tumor-stricken mice, despite those mice supposedly having been subjected to different experiments involving separate treatments and types of cancer cells.

The medical journal Cell Death & Disease retracted two of the latest studies, and Oncogene retracted the third. The journals found that the studies had also reused other images, like identical pictures of constellations of cancer cells.

The studies Dr. David flagged as containing image problems were largely overseen by the more senior Dr. Yoon. Changhwan Yoon, an associate research scientist who has worked alongside Dr. Yoon for a decade, was often a first author, which generally designates the scientist who ran the bulk of the experiments.

Kun Huang, a scientist in China who oversaw one of the recently retracted studies, a 2020 paper that did not include the more senior Dr. Yoon, attributed that study’s problematic sections to Changhwan Yoon. Dr. Huang, who made those comments this month on PubPeer, a website where scientists post about studies, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

But the more senior Dr. Yoon has long been made aware of problems in research he published alongside Changhwan Yoon: The two scientists were notified of the removal in January 2022 of their stomach cancer study that was found to have violated ethics guidelines.

Research misconduct is often pinned on the more junior researchers who conduct experiments. Other scientists, though, assign greater responsibility to the senior researchers who run labs and oversee studies, even as they juggle jobs as doctors or administrators.

“The research world’s coming to realize that with great power comes great responsibility and, in fact, you are responsible not just for what one of your direct reports in the lab has done, but for the environment you create,” Dr. Oransky said.

In their latest public retraction notices, medical journals said that they had lost faith in the results and conclusions. Imaging experts said some irregularities identified by Dr. David bore signs of deliberate manipulation, like flipped or rotated images, while others could have been sloppy copy-and-paste errors.

The little-noticed removal by a journal of the stomach cancer study in January 2022 highlighted some scientific publishers’ policy of not disclosing the reasons for withdrawing papers as long as they have not yet formally appeared in print. That study had appeared only online.

Roland Herzog, the editor of the journal Molecular Therapy, said that editors had drafted an explanation that they intended to publish at the time of the article’s removal. But Elsevier, the journal’s parent publisher, advised them that such a note was unnecessary, he said.

Only after the Times article last month did Elsevier agree to explain the article’s removal publicly with the stern note. In an editorial this week , the Molecular Therapy editors said that in the future, they would explain the removal of any articles that had been published only online.

But Elsevier said in a statement that it did not consider online articles “to be the final published articles of record.” As a result, company policy continues to advise that such articles be removed without an explanation when they are found to contain problems. The company said it allowed editors to provide additional information where needed.

Elsevier, which publishes nearly 3,000 journals and generates billions of dollars in annual revenue , has long been criticized for its opaque removals of online articles.

Articles by the Columbia scientists with data discrepancies that remain unaddressed were largely distributed by three major publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature and the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr. David alerted many journals to the data discrepancies in October.

Each publisher said it was investigating the concerns. Springer Nature said investigations take time because they can involve consulting experts, waiting for author responses and analyzing raw data.

Dr. David has also raised concerns about studies published independently by scientists who collaborated with the Columbia researchers on some of their recently retracted papers. For example, Sandra Ryeom, an associate professor of surgical sciences at Columbia, published an article in 2003 while at Harvard that Dr. David said contained a duplicated image . As of 2021, she was married to the more senior Dr. Yoon, according to a mortgage document from that year.

A medical journal appended a formal notice to the article last week saying “appropriate editorial action will be taken” once data concerns had been resolved. Dr. Ryeom said in a statement that she was working with the paper’s senior author on “correcting the error.”

Columbia has sought to reinforce the importance of sound research practices. Hours after the Times article appeared last month, Dr. Michael Shelanski, the medical school’s senior vice dean for research, sent an email to faculty members titled “Research Fraud Accusations — How to Protect Yourself.” It warned that such allegations, whatever their merits, could take a toll on the university.

“In the months that it can take to investigate an allegation,” Dr. Shelanski wrote, “funding can be suspended, and donors can feel that their trust has been betrayed.”

Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York. More about Benjamin Mueller