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Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent
Mickeycaskill writes: Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada claims it cut 25% of its network traffic (40% of video traffic) by deploying Adblock Plus across its internal network. The study tested the ability of the Adblock Plus browser extension (PDF) in reducing IP traffic when installed in a large enterprise network environment, and found that huge amounts of data transfer were saved by blocking web-based advertisements and video trailers. The experiment was carried out over a period of six weeks.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Disclaimer: the study was funded by Adblock Plus.
Gosh, they must be selling something. It's not as if they'd just give Adblock Plus away for free.
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
Local news sites have been some of the worst for me. I found one site that told my browser to keep downloading some resource from an ad network (no idea what it was) as long as the window was open, I just happened to have network tools open to see it. By the time I finished reading the story and closed the page the browser had downloaded tens of MB.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I can vouch for this as well. I monitor traffic from my linux router/firewall and have noticed significant decreases in over all bandwidth utilization with ad blockers enabled in the range of 25/35% depending on what I'm doing. Although I use Disconnect and/or uBlock ,as Ad Block Plus is a bit more of a resource hog. During my normal pointless browsing sessions, when Im not doing anything work related and just following click bait for mindless entertainment. I noticed a roughly 20% directly attributed to video ads. This is much less when I am doing something work or hobby related as I generally avoid the news sites and stick to forums and technical sites for information. That said, even some of my regular favorites *cough* Slashdot *cough* have started getting worse with the ads. Fortunately unlike most sites as a long time registered user, /. allows me to disable the ad's.
:D I simply can not imagine how truly successful that style of advertising is successful when 99 out of 100 people I talk to about it say they hate it and avoid clicking that crap, on principle, because it is so annoying.
For the record; I have NEVER in my life clicked an ad from a website that resulted in a purchase. I have only a handful of times, made purchases from email blasts when good deals were presented. Once from Tigerdirect, some from NewEgg during black friday deals, a couple times from REI, and once for a viagra, JUST KIDDING!