We all know that ad blockers gets rid of ads on websites and services like YouTube, thus preventing any unwanted videos and images to be displayed. However according to an in depth piece by the New York Times, they have conducted a test to find out how effective mobile ad blockers are, and they found that not only does it save you time, but money as well.
Their test was conducted using an iPhone 6 (presumably ad blockers on other platforms such as Android should yield similar results) with iOS 9 which allows for content blocking. They loaded a list of websites at least five times over the course of two days, and repeated the process but this time with an ad blocker installed. Unsurprisingly they found that websites with ad blockers installed loaded much faster.
For example when testing it on their own site, they found that it took 2.5 seconds to load advertisements, and 4.3 seconds to load content. This means that you could essentially save yourself 2.5 seconds with ad blockers installed, but here comes the interesting part about saving money.
Taking into account the average price of a data plan in the US, the report found that ad blockers can save you money. For example loading Boston.com everyday for a month would cost you about $9.50 in data alone just for ads, which is about $0.32 a day, versus loading just the content which costs $0.08 each time you visit.
That being said, there is debate about whether ad blockers are ethical. After all a lot of websites, including ours, rely on ads to make money and installing ad blockers cuts that off. Some have argued that this means that ads need to be designed in a way that isn’t intrusive, but if there was ever a case to start using ad blockers, this study done by the New York Times seems to be a pretty good place to start.
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