This is desktop, not mobile, but: I turned off ad blockers, scrolled to the bottom, and waited.
60.9MB transferred https://imgur.com/a/ftGkR3m. They are in fact worse than the rest of them. It is still going up as the ads rotate. I count 11 ad placements.
Saving the article text locally and gzipping it (which lacks html tags, but should be approximately right), it's ~1.5 kB. So 2kB for the article and say 5kB for a cacheable site-wide template is what things "ought" to be.
My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a phone plan at all at this point is being forced to have SMS for banking.
I’m due for a new phone and I’m strongly considering going to a dumb phone with a tablet around the house for browsing. I can carry a Kindle or something to kill time waiting for a train.
Question for the thread*: are we at a point where we build apps that chew through ad/user data, but put ourselves in a position to not have our
data chewed on?
*Mostly asking because I have come across this sentiment before, not because I think op(s) are engaged in this
I'd do that but a smartphone is unfortunately a great pocket camera. The sweet spot for me would be something like a modern version of the Nokia N95 — great camera, unrestricted OS that lets me write apps in Python or whatever, and terrible web browsing experience.
Opening this page 6 and a half times would exceed the monthly download limit on the first broadband internet plan my family had about twenty years ago in Australia.
Even though I use an adblocker, I got a huge table showing three Amazon products that took more space screen than any of the text block of the actual article.
I can't even imagine how the site looks like without an adblocker...
Advertising doesn't inherently imply wastefulness or even being spyware or a malware & scam vector.
If all the negative externalities were properly priced in, a lot of bottom-feeding crap at all layers of the stack will die off, but advertising itself will remain and would actually become better as a result for all parties involved.
If all the externalities were priced in, the model would certainly cease to exist. Several years ago I found a UN report saying the same about business more generally. I’ve recently tried to find it again, but it seems to have been removed.
Yes - advertising is very profitable. Increasing the cost would lead to a short term reduction in spend by advertisers, which would squeeze the adtech industry. They’d respond with improvements to their specs which reduce bandwidth and return levels closer to normal. Totally fixable problem with the correct incentives.
Interesting note, the privacy sandbox apis that google (was) is pushing were extremely bad for bandwidth to the point that in early tests our servers often did not respond in time to successfully bid in an auction. This occurred in many steps different steps of the auction (ssps as well). Google of course kind of moved away from this set up before fixes were implemented. (If the time between a user loading a page and the result of a programmatic auction is too long, ads may not be served)
I question the methodology of this: Enders used a browser that mimicked an iPhone 6 and accessed a total of eight "popular" news sites (though they didn't confirm what these were)."
'iPhone 6', an phone that's 10 years old. A sample size of 8 and undisclosed.
Aren’t browser-extension ad blockers (uBlock Origin, AdBlock, etc.) not helpful for solving this problem? As far as I’m aware, by the time the ad can be blocked by such programs, you have already consumed the data.
Wouldn’t a better solution be DNS sinkholing, like PiHole or AdGuard Home?
(Video portals aside)
The text you want to read: a few kilobytes.
The (oeconomical, an economical) cost of the ads surrounding it:
several dozen to a hundred megabytes.
You cannot convince me that this _isn't_ unsustainable quackery that got out of hands really, really bad.
html email was the start of a slippery slope. i remember complaining about data consumption of non-text email BITD. that was when the state of the art for email servers was to dedup list email so that the server would save only one copy and just reference it for all recipients.
Unsustainable for who? The websites use CDNs for dirt cheap bandwidth, mobile providers love that 20gb doesn’t go as far as it used to. It inevitably creates a synergy, between stuff like news websites and local telcos, and YouTube love it too. hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same, especially when major orgs will cache + colocate or peer to your isps.
If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opinions and feelings aren’t of importance to those in power.
Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.
Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.
Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.
>hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same
I don't see where anybody says that, nor where that claim would be necessary to support the thesis.
I've been long enough on HN to hear this argument since early 2010s, yet the market keeps proving everyone (including me!) wrong. Nobody cares if your website loads 20kb of text with a side of 1mb of ads. Most people are just swiping through megabytes of videos on TikTok and IG anyways.
Let’s be honest, general browsing internet usage is probably the least offensive use of energy in existence, particularly when talking about bloated filesizes of javascript. Feel free to disregard me while watching Netflix in 4k on Netflix approved hardware decoders on your 100 inch tv and surround sound, while using your heater to keep you warm, and enjoy your Uber eats hot chocolate for desert while scrolling tiktok on a phone you’ll throw away in two years time, though.
I don't disagree, but ecological impacts aren't addressed by one big magic bullet solution, it's a game of adding up pennies.
This is after focusing a lot on the other personal emission sources, but OTOH "install uBO and set it to Easy Mode" is one of the cheap and easy (low-hanging) interventions. Incidentally I generally watch videos at 360p, unless it's a lecture with small text on slides. Most 'taking head' content is just wasted pixels at higher resolutions.
I don’t think the savings of my browser are at all comparable to say, the Chinese industrial carbon footprint, not by a million miles.
A better approach than your current lifestyle would be to focus your efforts into something scalable that would actually have an impact rather than wasting your time.
I'll say it again: combatting ecological impact is a game of pennies.
You're missing the point by complaining that it's a smaller impact than all the industry in China (what isn't?), because there's nothing I (or anyone else) can do to eliminate the impact of all the industry in China. That is not one of the available 'moves' in this 'game.' It's a red herring.
That's what I meant by "magic bullet" thinking: you imagine you can only do one thing, and that one thing must fix 100% of the problem. In real life this problem (like most problems) isn't like that.
Also adblockers don't waste my time, they actually save me time. As far as mitigations go it has a good cost-to-benefit ratio, hence "low-hanging."
> focus your efforts into something scalable
Like, say, convincing lots of people (ideally some convenient population of technology thought leaders) that they should install uBlock Origin? :-)
But again, this premise that we're only allowed to do one thing is silly. I contain multitudes, and so do you.
Ads? Which ads? None on my devices at least. Block the filth already, there is no reason to subject yourself or your family to it. Get a device which is under your own control - nothing made by Apple, get an Android device on which you install something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS or another similar AOSP-derived distribution, do not use unmodified stock Android distributions - and install several layers of content blocking. Use a VPN with an endpoint at your own router on which you have more content blocking, that way you can safely use public WiFi hotspots. I never see advertising and would not accept anything else.
Most of the ads, except for those which Apple wants you to see, except for those in Apple applications, except for the fact that certain applications can not be changed because Apple controls which applications the device will use for given purposes, etcetera. Apple products remain under Apple control whether you like it or not unless they are 'jailbroken'. No, if you want as much control as possible Apple is not your friend.
ads aren't chewing though my mobile data. I generally don't go to any sites with ads. The few times I open a link and it's covered in ads I close the link.
You might not be seeing visible ads but you're going to plenty of sites that are using tons of tracking pixels and making a lot of requests with and about various data you are providing. That might not be as data intensive as auto playing a video ad but it certainly makes a big impact overall.
Dunno, I have a 15gb/month through Mint and just use 1Blocker on iOS. I watch Youtube on 5G and use my phone like anyone else yet have data left over. So it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of hidden data drain once you have a basic ad blocker.
Overtly consuming rich media from Youtube, Music, and Twitter dwarfs the data consumption of Safari.
Even your example of a tracking pixel is only going to be a handful of bytes.
I've solved this by mostly not even using most sites on mobile anyway. The vast majority of whatever dreck is served up is purely worthless anyway, social network-powered chum, listicle nonsense, or whatever does load up reflows eleventy times and crashes the tab. This link included. What little is left beyond that is just shallow information that you can mostly get from the original sources (this link included).
Same, with NextDNS. I used to deal with rooting and Magisk to use a hosts file based approach (Adaware) but as Android has become more locked down, DNS blocking has become the much less invasive solution.
Despite all their crypto bullshit and internal ad networks (which you can ignore/turn off), Brave mobile is great at blocking ads.
For instance ive never paid for YouTube premium to get rid of ads on mobile and allow background audio (yes they charge for background audio). On Brave mobile you can turn on background audio for all media and ive never seen/heard a YouTube ad.
Firefox mobile is great for this too. uBlock + sponsorblock + the fact that FF continues playing media when it's backgrounded make listening to long videos (like publicly recorded university lectures etc) a real breeze, it's a godsend if you like to listen to lectures while on long drives etc
Edit: ironically my post in this thread about how ads are partially enshittifying the internet, reads a bit like a sponsored endorsement for FF :-) ah well. It's still good.
I wish Brave had succeeded with their YouTube Premium model of web browsing. Let me pay one single provider to remove all web ads and paywalls, and that provider pays creators. Still a great mobile browser.
A lot of web pages only work for me on my iPhone if I use reader mode. Otherwise, the page keeps resetting over and over again. Firefox, but I assume Safari is probably the same, since Apple mandates they all be based on WebKit.
You can try adguard on iOS. It’s an app that you buy as an extension for safari but the block lists are very good and you can enable DoH systemwide as well.
As someone who switched from Iphone to Android, Adguard is very poor compared to uBlock, and it was in fact one major reason (of several) why I switched. But now that Google is killing adblockers, I might just stop browsing the internet entirely.
Hopefully Firefox will keep support for manifest 2 for the foreseeable future since they also have their own extension "store". In Chromes extension store new downloads of Ublock Origin have already been disabled and existing installations are slowly being disabled as they roll out the changes. I'm still on Vivaldi, but will be switching to Firefox very soon.
The fact that Firefox has had a near-perfect ad blocker for years and years, and the internet has only got less usable without an ad blocker and it's still struggling to break 1% on mobile is just so strange to me. It should be marketing open goal. Especially as the biggest competition has a conflict of interest that prevents them ever doing ad block well, so they can't lose out to a pivot by Chrome.
If you root your android then I believe AdAway is still a fantastic option because of the custom filters. Non rooted you can get personalDNSfilter from f droid, same thing but via VPN
The same is true for me on Safari. I've tried with and without AdGuard and the experience on plenty of sites that I just want to get a quick tidbit from is awfully painful.
Nothing is published yet. Whatever gecko build might be there might be whithering away on the vine, I don't believe Mozilla cares for supporting it just for the EU.
What web pages are you seeking out? I feel like I read hacker news, the New York Times and some local Reddit channels more or less. Search is so squirrelly and the passion GeoCities pages or Uni home pages are long gone, and blogs are corrupted by insidious sponsor endorsements, let alone ads?
I would prefer you to put hacker news in another category this site has quality information and comments unlike many other sites. This site also is not riddled with ads, which is a plus for all of us here. What makes you see that any other way?
I suppose, but Safari/Webkit shows that you can get what feels like 95% of the way there with static block lists which are ideal when they are sufficient.
They're faster and they're trustless. The only attack surface of a block list is that someone removes their site from the list.
This is the #1 reason for ad blocking in Eastern Europe and Asia (eg dolphin browser). It’s also why the current “solutions” big tech is providing viz. privacy and non-annoying ads doesn’t move the needle there.
This reminds me of the very first prosecution against "Hackers"
according to the lore of Bruce Stirling [0].
Since there were no cyber-laws to charge trespassers on digital estate
the intruders were charged with "stealing electricity".
Perhaps we forget that ads are also a crime of resource
misappropriation. Advertisers are not like vampires that are off the
hook if you invite them in.
"Don't worry. Now that net neutrality is certainly no longer a thing, arrangements can be made for adtech companies to pay ISPs directly to zero-rate their traffic. You won't benefit from this with any less ads or tracking, but your Internet bill may increase slightly less over time, at least until it's as high as your cable bill used to be."
Ridiculous thoughts from my grandmother. I disagree. People still watch TV even though there are ad breaks, ads on top of the show you are watching, and product placement within the TV shows. People clearly want ads otherwise they would use alternate means to get the information, such as DVDs, books, libraries, non-online classes, or seminars. If mobile data pricing goes up and the cost of ads to the end user is too high, the free market can sort it out. Honestly it's hard for me not to believe that blocking ads is anti-capitalist and against the free speech rights of advertising companies.
I just turn on Ultimate Data Saving mode, and then I add some apps to the exception list. I always also have Power Saving mode on, and that restricts background data usage significantly.
Ads are ok if they’re fixated on a page and aren’t intrusive but holy crap, some sites just takes to other sites when you click something and then when you come back it’s not the same page so you got to go back again and the cycle resets. I can’t imagine places where internet is super expensive and you deal with daily
Correct. And scoffing at them won't change anything.
Even if they didn't, the amount of data ads use massively slows down the experience of using the internet, especially when outside of a tower-dense area.
> AFAIK, a lot of mobile ad blockers work by proxying your traffic through their servers.
I don't know what your basis is for this claim. Mobile Safari had an API for content filter lists, and every ad blocker I’ve tried required me to enable several of these filters through the system settings. I don't think there's any way an iOS extension even could configure a proxy without user confirmation.
iOS ad blockers primarily work through the content blocker API, since several years ago. An app gives Safari a blocklist (which it's responsible for updating) and Safari applies that to any URIs it's asked to load.
I've been using Wipr for a few years now. It's basically set and forget.
My solution is a PiHole instance at home, combined with a split tunnel WireGuard connection to route my phone's DNS queries through it while I'm on the go. It's completely app- and platform-agnostic.
i’ve been doing the same for a few years now. wireguard’s “on demand” feature is perfect for this. the odd time i’ll have to shut it off to get through a captive wifi portal, but otherwise it (along with browser ad blockers) has made mobile browsing significantly less terrible
Be sure to read my follow up article, "How ads are funding the services you request the other half of your mobile data from, so you can use them without paying except with some mobile data and some pixels on your screen."
I hate intrusive ads as much as the next guy, but denying that ads have benefits and people overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones is simply sticking your head in the sand.
Saying people overwhelmingly choose ads is conceptualizing things wrong. Take this blog: it just copied a BI snippet about a study some other party did. No one even linked to the original study.
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
Sure, and the vast majority choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even many of the ones who claim to want to pay don't actually put their money where their mouth is when given the chance.
Revealed preferences are not reliable in situations where individuals make choices based on factors other than their true preferences, such as... limited information, social pressure, financial pressure (!!), impulsive behavior, addiction, lack of technical knowledge to pursue alternatives (!!), or when their preferences change significantly over time or moment to moment.
Recourse to "people have revealed their preferences" is the last refuge of the defenders of the status quo of deeply corrupted "markets".
I would love to have a way to pay for most websites but experience shows that the genius MBAs get your subscription fee and then start tacking on ads and tracking anyway. So fuck them. ad blockers, proxies, pihole, vpns, whatever you have to do.
Google gave people that but ~nobody used it (it was called Google Contributor). Many similar stories over the years. People overwhelmingly choose ad-supported services over paid ones. Even when "MBAs" don't add extra ads on top or whatever other objection you have, it's all been tried before and failed every time.
Those sites should consider sending surreptitious crypto miners instead, which would be more ethical. Then they'd only be using energy instead of using energy and bandwidth and also spying on and manipulating people.
Users should of course block all malware.
The other obvious thing to consider is that if you're going to write an article to convince people of your opinion, I'm not going to pay you for that. You're the one trying to influence me!
Wipr has been pretty reliable for me on iOS. I know digital advertising has helped support many web innovations but it's just getting brutal out there.
255 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThis could have been a few kilobytes of static html...
60.9MB transferred https://imgur.com/a/ftGkR3m. They are in fact worse than the rest of them. It is still going up as the ads rotate. I count 11 ad placements.
My 1GB mobile data plan should be enough to read at least 10s of thousands of pages in a month. Instead at 60MB, I could read... 16. Naturally I never use mobile data, and my only real use for a phone plan at all at this point is being forced to have SMS for banking.
*Mostly asking because I have come across this sentiment before, not because I think op(s) are engaged in this
Is the question “how many of you Adblock users also work in advertising tech?”
Opening this page 6 and a half times would exceed the monthly download limit on the first broadband internet plan my family had about twenty years ago in Australia.
Even though I use an adblocker, I got a huge table showing three Amazon products that took more space screen than any of the text block of the actual article.
I can't even imagine how the site looks like without an adblocker...
If all the negative externalities were properly priced in, a lot of bottom-feeding crap at all layers of the stack will die off, but advertising itself will remain and would actually become better as a result for all parties involved.
Interesting note, the privacy sandbox apis that google (was) is pushing were extremely bad for bandwidth to the point that in early tests our servers often did not respond in time to successfully bid in an auction. This occurred in many steps different steps of the auction (ssps as well). Google of course kind of moved away from this set up before fixes were implemented. (If the time between a user loading a page and the result of a programmatic auction is too long, ads may not be served)
'iPhone 6', an phone that's 10 years old. A sample size of 8 and undisclosed.
Wouldn’t a better solution be DNS sinkholing, like PiHole or AdGuard Home?
"oeconomical" is just an extremely archaic spelling of "economical", since the root word from Greek is "oikos", which Latinizes as "oecus".
Why did you mention it? Do you see it as a separate word?
If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opinions and feelings aren’t of importance to those in power.
Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.
Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.
Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.
I don't see where anybody says that, nor where that claim would be necessary to support the thesis.This is after focusing a lot on the other personal emission sources, but OTOH "install uBO and set it to Easy Mode" is one of the cheap and easy (low-hanging) interventions. Incidentally I generally watch videos at 360p, unless it's a lecture with small text on slides. Most 'taking head' content is just wasted pixels at higher resolutions.
A better approach than your current lifestyle would be to focus your efforts into something scalable that would actually have an impact rather than wasting your time.
You're missing the point by complaining that it's a smaller impact than all the industry in China (what isn't?), because there's nothing I (or anyone else) can do to eliminate the impact of all the industry in China. That is not one of the available 'moves' in this 'game.' It's a red herring.
That's what I meant by "magic bullet" thinking: you imagine you can only do one thing, and that one thing must fix 100% of the problem. In real life this problem (like most problems) isn't like that.
Also adblockers don't waste my time, they actually save me time. As far as mitigations go it has a good cost-to-benefit ratio, hence "low-hanging."
Like, say, convincing lots of people (ideally some convenient population of technology thought leaders) that they should install uBlock Origin? :-)But again, this premise that we're only allowed to do one thing is silly. I contain multitudes, and so do you.
Also add security and privacy costs to this.
Overtly consuming rich media from Youtube, Music, and Twitter dwarfs the data consumption of Safari.
Even your example of a tracking pixel is only going to be a handful of bytes.
For instance ive never paid for YouTube premium to get rid of ads on mobile and allow background audio (yes they charge for background audio). On Brave mobile you can turn on background audio for all media and ive never seen/heard a YouTube ad.
Edit: ironically my post in this thread about how ads are partially enshittifying the internet, reads a bit like a sponsored endorsement for FF :-) ah well. It's still good.
Tbh it's probably been a net positive, I just instantly bail after the first refresh
I only start Chrome if some very stubborn (usually financial) site fails to work with Firefox + ad blocking; this happens maybe 3-4 times a year.
They should absolutely put it front and center. A tickbox on first run.
Unless you’re a EU citizen
There's a long tail of random websites linked to by sites like this one -- like the one in the OP!
And yeah, I do come for the comments.
They're faster and they're trustless. The only attack surface of a block list is that someone removes their site from the list.
The static blocklists can be defeated easily by having ads served by the same domain.
In that case you are stuck due to apple's decisions.
This is the main reason it has become my default browser there.
Pages are often unresponsive or don't fully load. Zooming breaks so many sites. I'm always closing Safari and re-loading pages.
Are the web developers ignoring Safari? They can't be.
Since there were no cyber-laws to charge trespassers on digital estate the intruders were charged with "stealing electricity".
Perhaps we forget that ads are also a crime of resource misappropriation. Advertisers are not like vampires that are off the hook if you invite them in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
Ridiculous thoughts from my grandmother. I disagree. People still watch TV even though there are ad breaks, ads on top of the show you are watching, and product placement within the TV shows. People clearly want ads otherwise they would use alternate means to get the information, such as DVDs, books, libraries, non-online classes, or seminars. If mobile data pricing goes up and the cost of ads to the end user is too high, the free market can sort it out. Honestly it's hard for me not to believe that blocking ads is anti-capitalist and against the free speech rights of advertising companies.
Even if they didn't, the amount of data ads use massively slows down the experience of using the internet, especially when outside of a tower-dense area.
There may be more, but the only one I know works totally local is Firefox Focus.
You can install it, set it as the ad blocker for iOS Safari and never actually use it as a browser.
It’s not 100.0% effective. But, it makes a big difference with minimal hassle.
I don't know what your basis is for this claim. Mobile Safari had an API for content filter lists, and every ad blocker I’ve tried required me to enable several of these filters through the system settings. I don't think there's any way an iOS extension even could configure a proxy without user confirmation.
I've been using Wipr for a few years now. It's basically set and forget.
What about an embedded video window that covers the bottom 2/3rds of the content and follows with scroll?
Oh and I hope you've not left out the absolutely mandatory "Read More" button that spawns a user interaction and auto-plays everything on the page.
Those are all of my favourite things on the web and I really enjoy seeing them all over the place!!
Newsletter signup, location permission
Video covering every thing
These are my favorite adtech offsprings
People correctly value this at $0. This post is noise, and things like it just make web crawling/search harder to scale.
Recourse to "people have revealed their preferences" is the last refuge of the defenders of the status quo of deeply corrupted "markets".
Users should of course block all malware.
The other obvious thing to consider is that if you're going to write an article to convince people of your opinion, I'm not going to pay you for that. You're the one trying to influence me!