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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.
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...
Slashdot even had an ad that hijacked the browser and kept pulling the page back to the location of the ad on the page.
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.
... if you visit the first article linked in the story, while using AdBlock, you get a giant pop-up complaining about your doing so. :-)
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
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.
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.
See, this one guy said I should use his custom HOSTS file to block this stuff...
/duck
/run
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?
They give it away for free, but it's ad supported.
YES but we are not allowed the option.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
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.