Slashdot Mirror
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.
... 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!