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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches.

I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( https://www.gwern.net/Ads ) of (15% vs my 14%, 13-16% CI). The unit of analysis isn't the same but they're arguably equivalent.

This is also interestingly parallel to Pandora's giant A/B test: Huang et al 2018's https://davidreiley.com/papers/PandoraListenerDemandCurve.pd... "Measuring Consumer Sensitivity to Audio Advertising: A Field Experiment on Pandora Internet Radio".

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It seems to me like this study is looking at the correlation of heavy usage and ad blocker usage, and jumping to the conclusion that blocking ads is a cause for using the web more, and not the other way around.

It is correlational, yes, but it's consistent with what we expect (surely no one expects ads to have zero or even positive effects on Internet usage?), the direction & size of the effect are consistent with the 2 most relevant randomized experiments (linked in my comment), and they have longitudinal data which lets them control for a decent number of baseline characteristics like, to quote from the propensity scoring section:

- Active hours: Total time the user spent interacting with the browser - Session length: Total browser session time - Number of subsessions: Total Telemetry reports - Total tab open events: Number of tabs opened - Total URI count: Total number of pages loaded - Unique URI count: Number of unique websites (TLD+1) visited - Address bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the address bar - Search bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the dedicated search bar - Total Yahoo searches: Number of searches made using the Yahoo search engine - Total Google searches: Number of searches made using the Google search engine - Total searches: Total number of searches overall initiated from one of the Firefox search bars - Number of bookmarks: Total bookmarks added - Length of history: Total number of pages visited

So everyone with an adblocker had normal activity levels at the start (compared to the non-adblock-user they are 'matched' with by the propensity scoring), but after installation, then the adblocker people saw large increases in activity that their non-adblock counterparts, who were web browsing just as much before hand, did not experience.

This largely rules out the reverse causation of 'browsing -> adblock installation'. It could still be driven by people forecasting that they will be doing a lot of web browsing in the future and installing adblock before they begin doing all the extra browsing, but this feels a lot less plausible to me.

I do adblockradio.com. Thanks for the link about Pandora's AB testing!

Super cool, hadn't heard of this, trying it out right now. I have often thought about trying to do something like this for the AntennaPod pod-catcher. Do you have an ETA on your open source release?

https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/

A few weeks I hope

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