The Cost of Mobile Ads on News Websites

This is what annoys me about the supposed moral hazard around ad blocking. Content sites, particularly news providers have no respect for their users and just pile layer upon layer of crap.<p>At one point the huge org I worked for blocked all ads for local newspapers. Not because we hate ads, but because they were frequently used to deliver malware, and in one case malware suspected to be targeted at our organization.<p>We called the media outlet and even offered to help, but were rebuffed. So screw them I say.

Fine print at the bottom:<p>&gt; The data does not account for text compression, which reduces the size of text files.<p>I feel like this hugely downweights the differences, HTML and JS compress very well so this means images and other Ad data really take a huge chunk of the bandwidth.

Pretty terrible name for the article. It should be &quot;The Bandwidth Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites&quot;

30 seconds of loading just for ads?! Come on, this is ridiculous. I know they are supported by ads, but this excessive advertising is not the way to do it. There must be a better way.

I found the comparisons wanting, as they only estimated the delays caused by the downloading of the data. They apparently made no attempt to measure the performance impact of actually running all the trackers&#x2F;ads in the browser. From results posted elsewhere, I believe this is also a meaningful amount of time for many sites.<p>So the net improvement of an ad blocker may be even higher than stated here.

This is what really annoys me about not being able to block ads on Android. I am really hoping content blockers on iOS will convince Google to do it as well. 30 seconds of ads for an 8 second page is unacceptable. Not only that but the potential for malware with no protection is huge. Who knows what those ads are able to send back in tracking, or inject into the phone.

I expect big sites to start serving ads in a way that appears to be organic and would be hard to block. As long as people serve ads direct from ad network domains blocks is fairly easy. If the content looks like part of an article then it&#x27;s much more difficult to differentiate.

Reason why I started using Adblock is because of NFL.com<p>If you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play you will end up watching a commercial first. Super annoying !!!!

Classic poem with a modern twist..<p>First they came for the computer game developers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a computer game developer.<p>Then they came for the Musicians, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Musician.<p>Then they came for the the film makers, and I did not speak out—Because I did not make movies.<p>Then they came for news—and there was no one left to speak for me.