학술논문

Personalized Dynamic Counter Ad-Blocking Using Deep Learning
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on. 35(8):8358-8371 Aug, 2023
Subject
Computing and Processing
Accesslists
Behavioral sciences
Predictive models
Deep learning
Sensitivity
Recommender systems
Web pages
Online advertising
Ad-blocking
user behavior
deep learning
revenue
user engagement
personalization
Language
ISSN
1041-4347
1558-2191
2326-3865
Abstract
The fast increase in ad-blocker usage has resulted in significant revenue loss for online publishers. To mitigate this, many publishers implement the Wall strategy, where an adblock user is asked to whitelist the intended webpage. If the user refuses, the result is a loss-loss situation: the user is denied access to content, and the publisher cannot receive revenue. An alternative strategy, called AAX, is to show only acceptable ads to users. However, acceptable ads generate less revenue than regular ads. This article proposes personalized counter ad-blocking that dynamically chooses a counter ad-blocking strategy for individual users. To implement it, we propose a novel deep learning-based whitelist prediction model. Adblock users predicted to whitelist a page receive the Wall strategy; the others receive the AAX strategy. The proposed Deep Ad-Block Whitelist Network (DAWN) for whitelist prediction captures page characteristics, user interests in pages and their sensitivity to ads, reflected in historic behavior, using a deep learning mechanism. Furthermore, DAWN leverages multi-task learning on whitelist prediction and dwell-time prediction to boost performance. DAWN's effectiveness is validated on a real-world dataset provided by Forbes Media. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed counter ad-blocking policy over existing policies on revenue generation and user engagement.