Investigating Advertisers' Domain-changing Behaviors and Their Impacts on Ad-blocker Filter Lists

Ad blockers heavily rely on filter lists to block ad domains, which can serve advertisements and trackers. However, recent research has reported that some advertisers keep registering replica ad domains (RAD domains)—new domains that serve the same purpose as the original ones—which tend to slip through ad-blocker filter lists. Although this phenomenon might negatively affect ad blockers’ effectiveness, no study to date has thoroughly investigated its prevalence and the issues caused by RAD domains. In this work, we proposed methods to discover RAD domains and categorized their change patterns. From a crawl of 50,000 websites, we identified 1,748 unique RAD domains, 1,096 of which survived for an average of 410.5 days before they were blocked; the rest have not been blocked as of February 2021. Notably, we found that non-blocked RAD domains could extend the timespan of ad or tracker distribution by more than two years. Our analysis further revealed a taxonomy of four techniques used to create RAD domains, including two less-studied ones. Additionally, we discovered that the RAD domains affected 10.2% of the websites we crawled, and 23.7% of the RAD domains exhibiting privacy-intrusive behaviors, undermining ad blockers’ privacy protection.