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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 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.
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.
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.