Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent

Posted by Soulskill on from the blocking-youtube-would-cut-the-other-75% dept.

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.

33 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. I believe it... by dark.nebulae · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.

    Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...

    1. Re:I believe it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      We block advertising at the web proxy on our corporate network, and the savings is substantial, easily 25% when I look at the traffic reports/dashboards. Never mind protection from a malware vector, the improved browsing experience and network relief makes ad blocking a no brainer.

    2. Re:I believe it... by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      I am all for adds in websites... However many of them had became too intrusive, to take up so much bandwidth, or chew up too much cpu power to make it worth it.

      Adds should be relative to the content of the site/page, they should be clearly marked as adds, they in total should not take up more then 20% of the total sites resources. (Bandwidth, CPU, screen real estate... )

      I get it, a site offers service free of charge, so they use some space for advertising... I get that. However the goal is to get you to the adds by whatever means necessary, or the add company hijacks the site, then it goes too far.

      We watch TV we expect a 3 minute Commercial slot every 12 minutes. It is clear that it is a commercial. When stations go too far. people stop watching that station, as too much of the show is cutoff.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    3. Re:I believe it... by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Informative

      Gotta agree here, big-time. Even my own impromptu testing with AdBlock on/off shows that, as an example, roughly 20-30% of Facebook's packets carry advertisements to my browser. Sites like /. have the percentage down to something like 10% or so, personal and fringe sites maybe 5%, and at the other end, any ZDNet/CNET owned website blasts out soemthing like 25-35%. Don't ask what tomshardware.com and the gaming websites throw at you...

      While it's nothing more than an annoyance on my home machinery, I know that when I'm tethered, it makes a *huge* effing difference in data usage. I have it firmly installed on my mobile for just this reason.

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    4. Re:I believe it... by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There are few things that bug me more than a page load delay waiting for an ad url to respond.

    5. Re:I believe it... by Demonoid-Penguin · · Score: 5, Funny

      I banned Powerpoint presentations. Saves huge amounts of time, and server space. I don't have figures to support it, but I strongly believe it raises moral and stops a decline in general intelligence.

    6. Re:I believe it... by David_Hart · · Score: 2

      I banned Powerpoint presentations. Saves huge amounts of time, and server space. I don't have figures to support it, but I strongly believe it raises moral and stops a decline in general intelligence.

      (grin)

      Actually, the problem isn't Powerpoint or presentations. The problem is people who do not know how to create or give good presentations.

      Most boring presentations fall into the following categories:

      1. a presentation that you are forced to attend but that has no direct relevance to you, your job, etc.
      2. a presentation with too many details for the time slot. The Presenter speed reads the presentation
      3. a presentation where the presenter just reads the presentation. There are no explanations and no expansion on what appears on the slides. You could have just read the presentation in 10 minutes and gotten the same information.
      4. a presentation that has not been tailored to the audience.

      If you have ever watched a Ted Talk presentation, you will see that they use Powerpoint. The difference is that you are interested in the topic, the presenter is passionate about the topic and tells a story, and the slides include just the major points, they don't go into too much detail.

      Oh... and banning Powerpoint just wouldn't work... They would just use Word or, horrors, Excel.... (grin)

    7. Re:I believe it... by chihowa · · Score: 2

      Actually, the problem isn't Powerpoint or presentations. The problem is people who do not know how to create or give good presentations.

      The simplest rule of thumb is to minimize the number of words on the slides. It keeps the presenter and the audience from just reading the slides and forces the presenter to actually engage with the audience.

      If they removed the ability to insert text into Powerpoint slides, the workplace would instantly become a better place. (Really, people would just paste Word documents into slides or use more of those stupid clipart icons, but it would be better for one stupid meeting's worth.)

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
    8. Re:I believe it... by amicusNYCL · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    9. Re:I believe it... by ZenDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      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! :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.

    10. Re:I believe it... by chihowa · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I never said anything about boring people. If you need to actually present something instead of just handing out a document, then you should focus on presenting and not just showing text in the most inefficient format possible and then proceeding to read it from the screen.

      In my field, that means showing the plots of your data instead of a wall of text describing your interpretation of them (and then reading that wall of text). If you're not interacting with your audience then you're not aware of how well you're delivering the information.

      The point of a presentation is to deliver information by speaking. The point of a presentation aid like Powerpoint is to help you show things that you can't say or emphasize things that you can say. If you're just a talking head reading your slides out loud for the presumably literate audience, then you're just wasting everybody's time.

      If you can't be bothered to efficiently use a medium, then proceed to blame that ineptitude on your audience, try again.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
    11. Re:I believe it... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      The thing about the email ads is that, with a lot of those, you sign up for those willingly, and they're from places you're interested in buying from. Newegg is a good example here: you probably got those emails because you bought stuff from Newegg, and then clicked on a box to be put on their mailing list so you could see their specials. It's entirely reasonable to think that you, both a former Newegg customer and a Slashdot user, meaning you're most likely a tech worker or the like, would be interested in buying more stuff from Newegg, especially any special sales.

      This is entirely different from spam email, or your typical banner ads on websites, which isn't requested and usually not something you're interested in.

      Google, with their AdWords, proved long ago that targeted advertisement is far, far more effective than any kind of unrequested ads, for good reason.

  2. Now if only Slashdot would get rid of video ads. by hackwrench · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Slashdot even had an ad that hijacked the browser and kept pulling the page back to the location of the ad on the page.

  3. "the study was funded by Adblock Plus" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:"the study was funded by Adblock Plus" by Ksevio · · Score: 3, Funny

      They give it away for free, but it's ad supported.

  4. Laugh by koan · · Score: 2

    This seems like a "no duh" thing that would have been done long ago.

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
  5. Blocking Flash does a lot by tepples · · Score: 2

    Was this a Flash ad? I save a lot of Internet traffic and CPU time on an Atom laptop by just setting Adobe Flash Player to "ask to activate". In my experience, most major ad networks currently aren't smart enough to sense that the Flash object has failed to load in order to replace it with an HTML5 video ad.

  6. Text article with video ads by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I could see 25% if you handling mostly text/images. But with streaming services, I feel like it'd be a bit less.

    What tips the scale is the fact that a lot of sites stick video ads into text/image articles.

  7. AdBlockBlock by tepples · · Score: 2

    Adblock if you use the standard block lists blocks youtube ads.

    If it is acceptable for a client-side proxy or browser extension to block the display of preroll video ads, would it also be acceptable for YouTube to retaliate against the user of such proxy or extension by blocking the display of the video that plays after the preroll video ad?

    1. Re:AdBlockBlock by pla · · Score: 3, Insightful

      would it also be acceptable for YouTube to retaliate against the user of such proxy or extension by blocking the display of the video that plays after the preroll video ad?

      Absolutely! But when Joe Sixpack eventually figures out that "nothing works" at YouTube, he will stop going there.

      Also keep in mind that a lot of actual "content" consists of little more than advertisements in itself. Product reviews (even teardowns), music videos, movie trailers - Do you think YouTube wants to block someone from watching the real ad, just because they skipped the pre-ad?

  8. Re:Now if only Slashdot would get rid of video ads by dark.nebulae · · Score: 2

    I use noscript and have no ads nor tracking while on slashdot...

  9. Irony is... by Dredd13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)

  10. I'm surprised it's not more. by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Even though it's funded by adblock, I still believe it. May not be such high percentages, but it will certainly take a measurable chunk away.

    I'm surprised it's not more.

    Perhaps that's me, though. My browsing tends to be sites, such as Slashdot, where the meat I'm after is text, and the site's chaff is mainly icons, formatting-prettys, buttons, and other things that are static, image-light, and either susceptable to substantial compression or rendeded by the browser from small descriptions. Ads, meanwhile, tend to be image-rich, moving, and flashy, and designed for the add site's customer (who has litte concern for the viewer's costs) which chews up bandwidth.

    I'll presume it's so low either because others browse more bandwidth-intensive sites or site designers, in this age of broadband and optimized-only-for-appearance site design tools, are also not interested in keeping the bandwidth down (and the resulting performance up).

    Individual sites cry foul because they cannot meet their advertising targets affecting their revenue, but from the point of view of the user that is active on the net they are bombarded by advertising. Stripping even 10% away can be a good thing...

    For reducing viewer distraction, cutting bandwidth costs, and avoiding delays in web-page rendering.

    I NEED to suppress the ads when I'm at the ranch, with only slow dialup. A single image can make a page take minutes to load, when it could have been up in a second or less. So imagine one surrounded by banner ads, sidebar ads, embedded ads, footer ads, and so on. One animated ad can make the page take half an hour or more to load, and dynamic content can make it never finish at all, as the content changes outstrip the bandwidth.

    I even browse Slashdot with a configuration hack corresponding roughly to enabling firefox's long-lost "delay image loading" option. To do otherwise, even in classic mode and with "patron status or enough karma to disable ads", would be impractical.

    Without adblock plus AND noscript, (and maybe flashblock,) I'd be off the web when out of town.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  11. reduces some traffic, enables others. by nimbius · · Score: 3, Informative

    Adblock plus has a coloured history of cherrypicking advertisers to quietly ignore. It was accused of accepting bribes from google to allow their ads. it has a whitelist of ads it considers tasteful enough to allow as well. Its also been fingered for slowing the browser experience for many users.

    try microblock instead. And dont rely on just adblocking plugins to keep the network clean. null route known ad servers at home and work using a blacklist http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/. the same process can be applied to rooted android phones as well, creating an ad-free experience that saves you money.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:reduces some traffic, enables others. by Bengie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Adblock plus has a coloured history of cherrypicking advertisers to quietly ignore

      They openly advertise this, pun intended. They do claim to have a minimum quality requirement for whitelisted companies, and companies need to pay to get on that white list. Breaking the terms by having questionable ads can remove the companies from the whitelist forcing them to pay all over again. I seems to be done in a way that would cost a company more to break the rules.

  12. I believe it too, and also a pitch for Ghostery by dskoll · · Score: 4, Informative

    AdBlock Plus is awesome. Another really useful tool is Ghostery. It might not reduce bandwidth dramatically, but by blocking beacons, trackers, etc. it junks tons of JavaScript content and makes web pages render far more quickly. This really improves the browsing experience.

  13. I don't know... by halivar · · Score: 3, Funny

    See, this one guy said I should use his custom HOSTS file to block this stuff...
    /duck
    /run

  14. God Damnit by StikyPad · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The first rule of AdBlock Plus is that you do not talk about AdBlock Plus.

    THE SECOND RULE OF ADBLOCK PLUS IS THAT YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ADBLOCK PLUS!

    caps filter bypass: lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

    --
    https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  15. Re:If neither party is willing to foot the whole b by sims+2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    YES but we are not allowed the option.

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  16. Unequal sharing of bandwidth cost by tepples · · Score: 2

    So you still don't get the user to see the ad, all you've done is waste their *and your* bandwidth.

    Bandwidth is a lot cheaper for a server in a datacenter than for a viewer behind a WWAN (cellular or satellite) connection, which tends to have a cap of 3 to 10 GB per month. So WWAN users have a monetary incentive against downloading ads that will not be displayed.

  17. Where are the uBlock people? by waspleg · · Score: 4, Informative

    I remember a related story a few months ago and I was using Adblock Edge (forked non-sell out version of ABP) and advocating it. People kept spamming my thread saying that uBlock was better. So I tried it out and am now a convert. It is in fact lighter weight and nearly transparent, but since they don't pay for placement you have to search for it 2x in the add-ons to find it.

    I primarily use Firefox, with uBlock (you can enable even stricter subsets of rules if you want, I did without issue), HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger (the last 2 are from the EFF). I only see ads at work on other people's machines. There are other good add-ons for other stuff but this + wipe everything on browser close and private windows are nice.

    The only memory leaks seem to come from anything Flash based. So I'm forced to kill/restart FF every few days or it gets progressively slower and slower. I've noticed it's not really an issue without something running Flash.

  18. Re: Now if only Slashdot would get rid of video ad by ShaunC · · Score: 2

    The cynic in me wonders whether that was calculated marketing sleaze as opposed to laziness, maybe they're targeting people who try searching for Game of Thrones. The various app stores all have auto-suggest, so you start typing in "game of" and get other suggestions including Game of War.

    --
    Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
  19. Trashy Celebrity Block by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 3, Funny

    One of the great reasons to use Adblock Plus or equivalent is that you can write custom scripts in addition to the stock lists that it uses. All mention the Kardashians, Kanye West, and their ilk has vanished from my screens. Life is good.

    --
    Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.