So you’ve got a free minute and decide to read some news on your phone, but you’ve got no wi-fi so load up your mobile data roaming. A few minutes later you close down your browser after reading two maybe three articles, but there is one thing you don’t know about all that data you just used. The scary fact being those ads could account for well over 50% of the mobile data you just used.
In what was described as a “small-scale” study, a group explored six “popular publishers”, with the intention of finding out just how much data you use on your phone when it comes to online advertisements.
The results are shocking, to say the least. When comparing visits to the site, both with and without an ad blocker, the group found that somewhere between 18% and 79% of the data downloaded for the pages accounted to ads. If that surprises you, maybe knowing that anywhere between 6% and 68% of that came from JavaScript providing interactive elements.
With mobile provider Three blocking adverts at a network level you can see why if pages are swarmed with ad’s that do nothing but eat up your data.
Do you use an adblocker? If so what made you first start using it and are there sites that you don’t block ads to? Do you have rules for when to block a site and when you want to give them their revenue from adverts. I, for example, block any site that decides to play video adverts. I didn’t come to watch them and I don’t want to search a page to click pause only to have it load a new one a few seconds later. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
