TY - GEN
T1 - The Value of First Impressions
T2 - 20th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2019
AU - Newman, James
AU - Bustamante, Fabián E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - We present the first detailed analysis of ad-blocking’s impact on user Web quality of experience (QoE). We use the most popular web-based ad-blocker to capture the impact of ad-blocking on QoE for the top Alexa 5,000 websites. We find that ad-blocking reduces the number of objects loaded by 15% in the median case, and that this reduction translates into a 12.5% improvement on page load time (PLT) and a slight worsening of time to first paint (TTFP) of 6.54%. We show the complex relationship between ad-blocking and quality of experience - despite the clear improvements to PLT in the average case, for the bottom 10 percentile, this improvement comes at the cost of a slowdown on the initial responsiveness of websites, with a 19% increase to TTFP. To understand the relative importance of this trade-off on user experience, we run a large, crowd-sourced experiment with 1,000 users in Amazon Turk. For this experiment, users were presented with websites for which ad-blocking results in both, a reduction of PLT and a significant increase in TTFP. We find, surprisingly, 71.5% of the time users show a clear preference for faster first paint over faster page load times, hinting at the importance of first impressions on web QoE.
AB - We present the first detailed analysis of ad-blocking’s impact on user Web quality of experience (QoE). We use the most popular web-based ad-blocker to capture the impact of ad-blocking on QoE for the top Alexa 5,000 websites. We find that ad-blocking reduces the number of objects loaded by 15% in the median case, and that this reduction translates into a 12.5% improvement on page load time (PLT) and a slight worsening of time to first paint (TTFP) of 6.54%. We show the complex relationship between ad-blocking and quality of experience - despite the clear improvements to PLT in the average case, for the bottom 10 percentile, this improvement comes at the cost of a slowdown on the initial responsiveness of websites, with a 19% increase to TTFP. To understand the relative importance of this trade-off on user experience, we run a large, crowd-sourced experiment with 1,000 users in Amazon Turk. For this experiment, users were presented with websites for which ad-blocking results in both, a reduction of PLT and a significant increase in TTFP. We find, surprisingly, 71.5% of the time users show a clear preference for faster first paint over faster page load times, hinting at the importance of first impressions on web QoE.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85064056201&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_18
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-15986-3_18
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85064056201
SN - 9783030159856
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 273
EP - 285
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 20th International Conference, PAM 2019, Proceedings
A2 - Choffnes, David
A2 - Barcellos, Marinho
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 27 March 2019 through 29 March 2019
ER -