A new study suggests that using Apple's ad blockers are not only efficient in blocking annoying ads, it could help its users save time and money.
To most Internet users, ad blocking removes advertising content on web pages, especially for those who are not interested in seeing advertisements. Ads come in different forms such as pictures, animations, audios, videos, texts or pop-up windows. Most users complain of how these ads are making their Internet speed slower as they consume much bandwidth and memory. There were also complaints of ads carrying malware. As a result, ad blockers have become popular with 45 million Americans using them, according to Fortune.com.
As HNGN previously reported, ad blocking apps such as Peace, Purify and Crystal are dominating the App Store in the United States and elsewhere after Apple introduced mobile ad blocking in the Safari browser.
The New York Times researchers wondered whether it is really beneficial to use these ad blockers. They tested different ad blockers for four days and measured the amount of data that each blocker could save, the speed improvement of the devices, the increase on battery life, as well as the overall performance of the devices.
The researchers measured the data sizes of 50 popular websites with and without the ad blockers. They also timed how long before the iPhones' batteries drain.
The analysis showed that enabling the ad blockers significantly decreased the data consumption and made the battery life of the smartphones longer. For instance, the New York Times website took 41 seconds to load and consumed 3.7 megabytes without the ad blocker compared to 4 seconds of loading time and 2.1 megabytes consumed with the ad block enabled.
The findings provide evidence that using ad blockers are beneficial to consumers who are paying for a certain amount of data. Accessing Boston.com with the ad blockers, for instance, could result to a $9.50 savings per month, Tech Times reported.
This is certainly bad news for media companies and other sites that support online ads for revenue. Publishers have already lost nearly $22 billion during 2015 due to ad blocking, according to the ad blocking report released by PageFair.
