AdBlockers have quickly become part of everyday browsing for millions of people all around the world. The main reason? Because ads are incredibly annoying the vast majority of the time. We go onto sites to see content and not be bombarded with a sales pitch, after all. This has had a big financial impact upon news sites - take a trip on Wired and it won’t let you read an article without disabling your blocker of choice. However, the annoyance isn’t the only reason to block ads - recent figures show these ads can use up to 79% of your mobile data.
That figure seems high, and to be fair it is on the top end. However, the huge data costs of mobile ads has resonated with the providers and as a result, a few in the industry (like Three) have announced plans to roll out network-level mobile ad blocking for their customers. A recent report released by Enders Analysis appears to back up that claim - at least when it comes to a sample of news websites.
Enders carried out an experiment where their testers loaded eight pages from a number of popular news sites using a browser that simulated an iPhone 6. The researchers compared data usage when a full page loaded without an ad blocker, with an ad blocker, and with an ad blocker and JavaScript disabled.
The study found that ads accounted for between 18% and 79% of the mobile data used, depending on the site. JavaScript elements - often used by publishers for ads, but also for visual elements in animations - added an extra 6% to 68%. Although the range in these figures is massive, the researchers concluded that it is reasonable to say advertising accounts for half of all the data used by publisher pages over mobile data networks. "Publisher mobile pages are bloated and advertising is an enormous part of that," Enders says.
Although Adblock is fast becoming commonplace, it does leave news sites in a difficult position; they need adverts to keep the lights on, who would pay for an advert with the knowledge that it will be blocked anyway? In order to help matters; Google, Apple, and Facebook have all recently rolled out options for advertisers to help reduce the this data hungry factor and increase page load times - with the likes of Google AMP, Apple News, and Facebook Instant Articles.
It remains to be seen just how effective these will be with advertisers, some publishers have expressed concern over giving too much control to third parties like the three big tech companies mentioned earlier. However, this isn’t going to go away anytime soon - something has to give.
