Ad blocking for Data Hungry Ads

Ad blockers are spreading like fire and going by the projections made by Mobile marketing company Tune, ad blocking might reach 80 percent of smartphone owners by the third quarter of 2017.

The survey that was released in the first week of March revealed that ad blockers are being downloaded at a rapid rate with 24.6 percent of respondents (sample size- 4,000 smartphone users in the US and Europe) saying that they use an ad blocking app or web browser.

A new report surfaced this week from Enders Analysis which provides some interesting insights into the ad-blocking phenomenon. One of the reason people downloads mobile ad blockers, according to the report is the impact ads have on their data plans.

In a small-scale experiment, researchers studied eight web pages from "popular publishers” and compared data usage with and without an ad blocker and found that ad content accounted for between 18 percent and 79 percent data download. In addition, JavaScript - often used by publishers for ads and other interactive elements- took away an extra 6to 68 percent.

The report said: “On the basis of this investigation, an estimate that says advertising accounts for half of all data used by publisher pages on iPhones does not look unreasonable. Publisher mobile pages are bloated, and advertising is an enormous part of that.”

Data usage is also the main reason behind recent announcements by carriers like Three in Italy and the UK, and Digicel in the Caribbean, to roll out network-level mobile ad blocking for their customers.

Online publishers that rely on advertising for revenues are taking a number of steps to addressed blocking that include optimising websites, adopting less intrusive ad formats and asking readers to switch off adblockers to support content they are consuming.

Recently tech giants Google, Apple, and Facebook also rolled out options like Google AMP, Apple News, and Facebook Instant Articles respectively for publishers to help reduce the "bloat" of an advertisement within their articles and increase page load times - while still generating revenue.