Acceptable Ads Users See 13.6% More Spammy Ads

Acceptable Ads is presented as a middle ground to its users: fewer ads, cleaner layouts, and formats that don’t make you want to stab your eyeballs out with toothpicks.

And on that front — formats, placements, quantity — it delivers. Users see fewer, less intrusive ads than the free-for-all of the open web.

But what if, in terms of ad quality, turning it on actually makes things worse?

That’s what a study by researchers at New York University suggests. They audited the real-world experience of users who enabled Adblock Plus with Acceptable Ads switched on — and compared it to a normal, ad-filled web experience.

Their claim?

On average, those who opted in to Acceptable Ads saw 13.6% more “problematic” ads than everyone else. If you’re under 18, that number jumps to 21.8%. US users? 17.6%.

In other words, the “acceptable ads” experience exposed people to more spam ads than browsing without an ad blocker.

Important to note: these figures are normalised. The researchers calculated the proportion of “problematic” ads relative to total ads served.

So it’s not saying Acceptable Ads users saw more bad ads overall (they obviously didn’t). It’s saying that, among the ads they did see, a higher share were flagged as problematic.

What counts as “problematic”?

OK — let’s get objective.

How exactly did the researchers classify these ads a problematic? Just think of what you would consider the spammiest types of ads to be:

• Gambling or alcohol ads aimed at minors

• Sexually explicit or offensive imagery

• Miracle cures and “get rich quick” schemes

• Fake buttons and urgency tricks

• Political ads stirring up controversy

  

  Example ads provided in the study.

So how does a feature designed to make ads less annoying surface more trash?

Well, Acceptable Ads isn’t a standard that sets criteria for the content of the ad. It’s sets criteria for its format. Size, placement, labelling, etc.

Think of it like magazines: The Economist and Hustler are the same format (a magazine) but their content is very different.

Therefore, there is no rule preventing spammy ads under the Acceptable Ads standard. That’s a slippery slope, since it becomes a form of censorship.

So, the next question is, why do spammy ads tend to appear more for Acceptable Ads users than non ad blocking users? (allegedly)

The mechanics behind it

Acceptable Ads inventory mostly gets bought programmatically on the open market. Think of it like a stock market for ads. There’s buyers (advertisers) and sellers (publishers) of ad impressions — who transact through ad exchanges as the intermediary.

The study blames adverse selection: Acceptable Ads relies on an allowlist of “trusted” exchanges from which ads are filtered for suitability. When you create that kind of walled garden, premium advertisers step back while opportunists move in.

The researchers argue it’s about compliance friction — big brands avoid the extra hoops, leaving room for lower-quality buyers. This all sounds plausible on the surface, but the real driver is likely much simpler: low signal.

Acceptable Ads users carry less cookie data, which means weaker targeting. And when advertisers can’t segment by intent, the buyers who dominate are the ones who don’t care who you are — cheap, spray-and-pray campaigns. You know… get rich quick schemes. Miracle cures. “One weird trick” health hacks.

Meanwhile, premium brands like Ford or BMW? They want auto intenders — people actively shopping for a car, identified through digital signals like cookies. They put their budgets where they can see (or at least believe they see) who they’re buying.

The economics confirm this: it’s widely known Acceptable Ads inventory clears for less on open exchanges. The lower price is not because buyers devalue Acceptable Ads in principle, but because these impressions are less targetable, reducing bid density. When there is less advertisers bidding for the inventory it gets bought for a lower price.

Often, these impressions attract no bids at all. That happens with regular inventory too, but the ratio is noticeably higher for Acceptable Ads.

You can even see traces of this in the study, though the researchers likely missed it. In their mosaic of “problematic” ads, one example is from a brand called “United24 Media”. This ad impression was provided out of good will — charity — by the publisher.

That’s not a fluke. Good will placements often appear when no advertiser steps in to buy the impression. It’s filler for unsold inventory.

Adblock Analyst View

Is the study’s headline finding — that Acceptable Ads users see more spammy ads — believable? Directionally, yes. The exact percentages are hard to validate, but the mechanics make sense: lower signal equals lower value equals lower-quality ads. That chain holds up in real-world programmatic economics.

That said, the research isn’t bulletproof. Some caveats worth noting:

• The headline stat can mislead: Acceptable Ads users saw a higher share of low-quality ads, not necessarily more in total. A non-ad-blocking user could still be exposed to more “spammy” ads in absolute terms.

• Single-browser testing: The study only used Chrome. That matters because Chrome, even with Adblock Plus, permits more residual tracking compared to Firefox (where the extension is also available). And then there’s Opera, which has ad blocking — and Acceptable Ads — directly built into the browser. If the test had included those environments, the signal gap (and resulting quality drop) might look even worse.

• No cross-device context: User ad experiences aren’t confined to desktop. Acceptable Ads also runs on mobile, where the gap between ad content quality may be more or less pronounced.

Bottom line? The study’s core claim rings true, but the magnitude is debatable. Still, it’s a thorn in the Acceptable Ads narrative.

Adblock Analyst

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