Digital Advertising Hits a Road Block with Ad Blockers

Summary: With Apple’s iOS9, ad blocker apps can improve the experience users have web browsing by reducing data usage and page loading times.

Advertising has turned to digital with no intention of having to go back to the traditional forms of printed ads. However, ad blockers may change that if companies want their ads to be seen. A recent test done by The New York Times exposed the truth that ads have on data costs, data usage, page loading times and battery life on smartphones, specifically the new iPhone 6.

The reason for the study on ad blockers came forward after Apple released their iOS 9 update that allows ad blocker apps. This is causing advertising companies to tremble as the future of digital ads on cellphones is at stake.

The test done by The New York Times compares three ad blockers: 1Blocker, Crystal, and Purify data to not using anything at all. They looked at the data sizes of 50 of the most popular news websites through the ad blockers and without them, all while on a 4G network. They also reviewed how the apps affected the battery life during web browsing.

The results are worth looking at for those that care about their data usage and load times. The New York Times reported, “For a number of websites that contained mobile ads with a lot of data, Web page data sizes decreased significantly and load times accelerated enormously with ad blockers turned on. The iPhone’s battery life also improved – but more modestly – with ads removed.”

With ads enabled, Boston.com took 19.4MB whereas without ads, it could be reduced to 4MB. This means the page took 39 seconds to load with ads or only 8 seconds without ads. The study also revealed that this translates to $.32 cents of data each time the page loads, which for a month equates to $9.50 if the page is visited once each day.

Source: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/study-ios-9-ad-blockers-save-iphone-users-time-data-and-money/

Photo: techtimes.com