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Ads chew through half of mobile data

220 points by mahirsaid 2y ago

comprev 2y ago
Needs (2016)
wiseowise 2y ago
"B-b-but this is necessary, because reasons" Also add security and privacy costs to this.
isoprophlex 2y ago
Well, nextpit.com, you're really no better than the rest of them. This could have been a few kilobytes of static html...
- nerflad 2y ago
  Blogspam singularity is imminent. Also: this 'article' is from 2016.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  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 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.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    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.
    - benreesman 2y ago
      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.
      - dleeftink 2y ago
        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
        fn-mote 2y ago
        All of the people posting about adblockers have certainly done something about their rate of data use. Is the question “how many of you Adblock users also work in advertising tech?”
      - jkestner 2y ago
        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.
  - cjs_ac 2y ago
    > 60.9MB transferred 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.
- wiether 2y ago
  Yeah I thought the same. 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...
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    I saw no ads with Firefox/ublock origin.
- mattmcknight 2y ago
  uBlock counter got up to 26 before I was done skimming the article.
- troupo 2y ago
  On top of that they kindly share all your data with 383 "partners", and you have to click "no" one by one to opt-out
Biologist123 2y ago
Fantastic example of a negative externality. Question: if the data costs were internalised, would an advertising-based revenue model be sustainable?
- noprocrasted 2y ago
  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.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    Perhaps not inherently, but it certainly exists this way now.
- amelius 2y ago
  The biggest negative externality of advertising is the fact that it drives mass overconsumption.
  - Biologist123 2y ago
    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.
- soared 2y ago
  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)
RegnisGnaw 2y ago
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.
- malfist 2y ago
  Article is 8 years old, so a 10 year old phone makes sense
  - RegnisGnaw 2y ago
    Sample size, undisclosed, of 8 websites?
didgetmaster 2y ago
It's not just ads. It's websites like nextpit that make you navigate through pop-ups and links just to get some basic info.
quantumquetzal 2y ago
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?
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Ad blockers intercept the request and cancel it before it's actually made. It's wise to use both methods.
GuestFAUniverse 2y ago
(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.
- jiveturkey 2y ago
  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.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > The (oeconomical, an economical) "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?
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
  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.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    >Unsustainable for who? People who live on Earth? 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.
hagbard_c 2y ago
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.
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Even an i-device can use adguard plus and get rid of most of the ads.
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    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.
mikae1 2y ago
GrapheneOS, Firefox/Mull and uBlock Origin. Nope. :)
- tomsmeding 2y ago
  GrapheneOS unnecessary. Plain Android with Firefox and uBlock Origin suffices.
nox101 2y ago
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.
- staplar 2y ago
  I’m going to take a wild guess that most of the world ain’t you?
  - recursive 2y ago
    Trivially true for all individuals. But also, anyone can use this solution.
- AlwaysRock 2y ago
  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.
  - hombre_fatal 2y ago
    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.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  The article was not written specifically about you as an individual. You might be confusing this discussion board with your e-mail inbox?
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
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).
andrefuchs 2y ago
I'm using DNS66 on Android to block ads at the DNS level. I wouldn't browse on mobile without it.
- blacksmith_tb 2y ago
  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.
- overhead4075 2y ago
  This and Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin
ziofill 2y ago
I love that the mobile version of the brave browser tells you how much data it saved you and how much time too.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  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.
  - erinaceousjones 2y ago
    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.
- 0xpgm 2y ago
  I agree, that is a pretty good feature. You start feeling good when the data saved is in the gigabytes and time saved viewing ads is in the hours
- smoovb 2y ago
  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.
- theandrewbailey 2y ago
  Desktop Brave does, too.
- deleted 2y ago
metabagel 2y ago
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.
- Bancakes 2y ago
  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.
  - samtheprogram 2y ago
    I was trying to figure out why this doesn’t happen to me, and it’s probably AdGuard. Highly recommended.
  - encom 2y ago
    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.
    - bcraven 2y ago
      Firefox on Android supports extensions so I have uBlock running.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Firefox on Android does work and does run uBlock Origin all right. 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.
      - encom 2y ago
        But how long is manifest v2 going to survive on Firefox?
vrc 2y ago
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.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
freitasm 2y ago
I think ads on mobile apps is a much bigger problem for these users.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
"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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Good one!
__rito__ 2y ago
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.
staplar 2y ago
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
stalfosknight 2y ago
Some people still don't have unlimited data?
- foobarchu 2y ago
  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.
corysama 2y ago
AFAIK, a lot of mobile ad blockers work by proxying your traffic through their servers. 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.
- david_allison 2y ago
  uBlock Origin is supported by Firefox on Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
- ghostly_s 2y ago
  > 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.
- redwall_hp 2y ago
  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.
- CubsFan1060 2y ago
  1Blocker works quite well as well.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  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.
modeless 2y ago
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."
- potsandpans 2y ago
  I think I'll pass.
- techsupporter 2y ago
  Does it have an in-frame modal that pops up immediately after page load to beg me for my email address? 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!!
  - jl6 2y ago
    Popups onmouseout, recaptcha handwritten Newsletter signup, location permission Video covering every thing These are my favorite adtech offsprings
  - modeless 2y ago
    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.
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      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.
jcoletti 2y ago
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.
apples_oranges 2y ago
Install Brave browser. You probably won’t go back if you try it.
pier25 2y ago
It's immoral that you cannot turn off videos in a browser and/or that this isn't the default option on phones.
- drukenemo 2y ago
  I use Stopthemadness to stop video autoplay
  - musicale 2y ago
    The fact that we need a "stop the madness" app for Safari is proof of Safari's insanity. If Stopthemadness actually works reliably, it is also an existence proof that blocking video autoplay is possible, and that Apple is simply not fixing the "never auto-play" setting in Safari. Perhaps Apple and Mozilla should just remove the "never auto-play" settings in Safari and Firefox and say that they are doing so in order to empower web sites and adtech companies (including Google/youtube, who pays them a lot of money) to force you to view unwanted video advertisements.
- musicale 2y ago
  I agree. It's insanely user-hostile that the "never auto-play" setting in Safari (for example) doesn't work and hasn't worked for years. To be honest, I have no recollection of it ever working reliably. Although it is an arms race and obnoxious web pages can have javascript/webassembly video players that render into a canvas, etc., I still blame Apple for not sorting this out, and even backtracking on click/tap-to-play. IIRC, at some point Apple did roll out default click/tap-to-play on iPhones, and there was a huge outcry from web developers (probably including Google/youtube) that it broke their sites. I expect the real complaint was that it interfered with pushing unwanted video advertisements.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  You can do that easily on iOS.
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  You probably mean "iphones" Android firefox does have an option to turn off autoplay (video and sound) It can't be set as default because most people are used to spam ads. Heck, most people seek them on tictok
aschla 2y ago
A solution: AdGuardHome and WireGuard running at home. WireGuard connects on-demand when I leave home. I choose to run it at home because there are cases where services and/or sites block datacenter IPs, and I have complete control over what and how I block, no proxying through any blocking service.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  A solution for you and some other tech savvy individuals; not a great solution for the rest of my family. Plus, it ignores the systemic problem in exchange for personal one-off bandaids.
  - aschla 2y ago
    A one-off solution like this is really the only type of solution we have in the face of a massive ad tech industry that largely piggybacks on top of, and inserts itself into, foundational network and web protocols. Fixing the problem itself would likely require legislation and regulation to get ad tech companies (or the companies that use the ad tech) to pay attention to the data use.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      So, there are two solutions - one-off bandaids, and legislation.
  - j45 2y ago
    Many homes can run whole their route. Im curious how much time or money you’d be willing to invest and spend monthly to have this solved simply?
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Homes, sure - what about mobile devices? What about the rest of my family who's not at home? What about the sysadmin work I'll have to put in to support this?
linsomniac 2y ago
Only half? The number of pages I load that have a video playing in them would make me think it's way, way higher than that.
znpy 2y ago
I assume the worst offender in this is youtube. It’s awful because ads ALWAYS load immediately, but the actual media i want to watch always lags or is buffering. When i’m on mobile data advertisements are always super clear and in super high resolution, but i often get pushed low-res versions of the media. I really hope some better company comes and dismantles YouTube as a business. Edit: i’m using plain YouTube on plain iOS, so it’s all on google/YouTube.
everdrive 2y ago
Honestly, just stop using your phone most of the time. You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle. It's not actually difficult (in principle) to avoid mobile ads: don't use your phone in the first place, don't browse to web pages, and don't install apps. For anyone who says "but what if I'm out and I need to?" -- that's a fine exception if you're not actually using your phone the other 99% of the time.
- blueboo 2y ago
  Considering we have 25 years of adtech and we presently have multiple effective solutions for adblocking on mobile and desktop, I’d need some additional evidence to be sure that is “ultimately a losing battle”.
  - everdrive 2y ago
    So I consider myself to be pretty aggressive compared to the normal user when it comes to adblocking. I use Pihole, pfsense (just some blocking IP lists), ublock origin + custom filters & lists, noscript, and also just have a firm household policy about unavoidable ads. (companies have a "1 strike you're out" policy in my household for anything egregious. Spotify earned a lifetime ban probably over a decade ago. It's likely the original offense has not been relevant for years, but I don't care. They're out of the running permanently.) That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.
ausaus 2y ago
On Android I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and adguard DNS as a private DNS.
kivle 2y ago
Worst example I've seen is an app called Foodora here in Norway (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc). On the order confirmation page where you're following your order status, following the driver on the map, etc, they would have video ads playing _uncached_. It was literally using like 1 MB/s of traffic continuously while you were checking the order page.
crazygringo 2y ago
Surprising they don't mention what I imagine has to be the obvious culprit: video ads. It's not even about advertising for me -- static ads don't bother me that much. But whenever there's autoplaying video in the corner of a page, I hate it so much. Whether it's an ad, or a news site that inexplicably thinks I want to multitask and watch their news channel at the same time I read their article. It's genuinely hard to read the article when there's constant motion an inch or two away at all times!
- catlikesshrimp 2y ago
  Firefox has an option to turn autoplay (sound and video) off for those ads that get past ublock origin.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    uBlock Origin can also block media elements larger than X MB (I use 8 MB so it still loads large images), preventing the video from loading in the first place. Disabling autoplay prevents it from playing, but the video is still downloaded.
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      Does this actually work? Most videos on the internet aren't loaded as one large file, but as sequence of short few-second long chunks.
  - pornel 2y ago
    Ads work around lack of autoplay by loading massive image filmstrips containing video frames (often split across hundreds of image files), and animating that in JS or CSS. This has all the annoyance of autoplay, with even worse bandwidth and memory usage.
- alden5 2y ago
  That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains
ngcazz 2y ago
If we're losing net neutrality then ad traffic should be entirely financed by ISPs
syntaxing 2y ago
Paying $20 a year for NextDNS is easily my top value purchase. Makes browsing on iOS a sane experience.
nytesky 2y ago
Let’s take the moment to hat tip Hacker News for no ads!
imoreno 2y ago
Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
  - rlpb 2y ago
    > The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. I disagree. The value I get from the Internet is almost entirely from non-ad-driven sources. The ad-driven stuff is very low value to me.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      you never used google search? if not you should check it out - it is not bad - https://www.google.com https://www.google.com
      - xigoi 2y ago
        I prefer Kagi, which does not have ads.
        t0bia_s 2y ago
        But you have to pay for it and link your credit card with it. Which is privacy nightmare. I have whatever search engine without ads for free. uBlock + NextDNS do the job.
      - lukan 2y ago
papavancato 2y ago
Got attacked by two ads immediately at opening the page
luuurker 2y ago
[dead]
dawnerd 2y ago
Ad people also don’t even care about best practices. Many times years ago we’d see multi meg static banner ads. The situation isn’t better today, massive gifs are still used in place of video.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Few things are more soul crushing than having a VP of CTO mandate a bunch of metrics for page size and load time and then to have someone load up all your hard work with trackers, analytics and ads. Like what was the point of us doing all this now the page loads in five seconds so you can be nosey?
hinkley 2y ago
iOS Safari has a setting that can use another app to do privacy controls and you can set Firefox Focus to be that app. It’s very nice. I got tired of how slow pages were loading on my phone, and got fed up one day and turned it on. That and ads that resize and push down the content you’re about to click on to make you misclick were the final straws.
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
maxwellg 2y ago
I finally took the time this weekend to get the family switched over to using NextDNS. I use uBlock Origin on my laptop but it's nice to have something for mobile too. I've been getting heated when my partner hands me her phone to show me a recipe and it's completely covered in ads.
- ifdefdebug 2y ago
  > but it's nice to have something for mobile too what's wrong with uBlock Origin on mobile? (available in Firefox)
  - ornornor 2y ago
    iOS and ad-blocking in apps that aren’t Firefox on android
zzo38computer 2y ago
It is not only the data amount but also power. Those who display ads on your computer are stealing these things from you, so they are the thieves. However, it is not only the ads, but also other stuff, such as spyware, inefficient programming, excessive animations and fancy effects, etc.
gwern 2y ago
Original is https://www.endersanalysis.com/reports/blocking-free-world-threat-online-ad-blocking https://www.endersanalysis.com/reports/blocking-free-world-t... but paywalled.
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ornornor 2y ago
If you have an iPhone, NextDNS is free/very cheap and blocks all ads everywhere (except in the YT app, for this you need to route the YT traffic over to Albania, they get no YT ads there for some reason)
pvtmert 2y ago
I think the title needs 2016 since nowadays many ads transitioned from just pictures to even videos. Consisting much more than the text I read... I would even argue this is a larger issue than the JS bloat websites are having...
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
t0bia_s 2y ago
Wireguard devices to home, where Pi-hole and NextDNS filter all ads. Noone in my family saw an ad over few years. It's always shock to se how many ads grandparents has in TV, especially for kids that are rised in adfree environment.
SergeAx 2y ago
I wonder how much data are eaten by analytics and telemetry.
nipperkinfeet 2y ago
Not on my devices. Adguard DNS with Firefox and uBlock on desktop and Android phone.

220 points by mahirsaid 2y ago

comprev 2y ago

Needs (2016)

wiseowise 2y ago

"B-b-but this is necessary, because reasons" Also add security and privacy costs to this.

isoprophlex 2y ago

Well, nextpit.com, you're really no better than the rest of them. This could have been a few kilobytes of static html...

nerflad 2y ago
Blogspam singularity is imminent. Also: this 'article' is from 2016.
lelandfe 2y ago
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 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.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  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.
  - benreesman 2y ago
    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.
    - dleeftink 2y ago
      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
      - fn-mote 2y ago
        All of the people posting about adblockers have certainly done something about their rate of data use. Is the question “how many of you Adblock users also work in advertising tech?”
    - jkestner 2y ago
      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.
- cjs_ac 2y ago
  > 60.9MB transferred 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.
wiether 2y ago
Yeah I thought the same. 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...
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  I saw no ads with Firefox/ublock origin.
mattmcknight 2y ago
uBlock counter got up to 26 before I was done skimming the article.
troupo 2y ago
On top of that they kindly share all your data with 383 "partners", and you have to click "no" one by one to opt-out

Biologist123 2y ago

Fantastic example of a negative externality. Question: if the data costs were internalised, would an advertising-based revenue model be sustainable?

noprocrasted 2y ago
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.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Perhaps not inherently, but it certainly exists this way now.
amelius 2y ago
The biggest negative externality of advertising is the fact that it drives mass overconsumption.
- Biologist123 2y ago
  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.
soared 2y ago
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)

RegnisGnaw 2y ago

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.

malfist 2y ago
Article is 8 years old, so a 10 year old phone makes sense
- RegnisGnaw 2y ago
  Sample size, undisclosed, of 8 websites?

didgetmaster 2y ago

It's not just ads. It's websites like nextpit that make you navigate through pop-ups and links just to get some basic info.

quantumquetzal 2y ago

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?

ndriscoll 2y ago
Ad blockers intercept the request and cancel it before it's actually made. It's wise to use both methods.

GuestFAUniverse 2y ago

(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.

jiveturkey 2y ago
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.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> The (oeconomical, an economical) "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?
hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago
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.
- schiffern 2y ago
  >Unsustainable for who? People who live on Earth? 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.

hagbard_c 2y ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Even an i-device can use adguard plus and get rid of most of the ads.
- hagbard_c 2y ago
  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.

mikae1 2y ago

GrapheneOS, Firefox/Mull and uBlock Origin. Nope. :)

tomsmeding 2y ago
GrapheneOS unnecessary. Plain Android with Firefox and uBlock Origin suffices.

nox101 2y ago

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.

staplar 2y ago
I’m going to take a wild guess that most of the world ain’t you?
- recursive 2y ago
  Trivially true for all individuals. But also, anyone can use this solution.
AlwaysRock 2y ago
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.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  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.
carlosjobim 2y ago
The article was not written specifically about you as an individual. You might be confusing this discussion board with your e-mail inbox?

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

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).

andrefuchs 2y ago

I'm using DNS66 on Android to block ads at the DNS level. I wouldn't browse on mobile without it.

blacksmith_tb 2y ago
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.
overhead4075 2y ago
This and Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin

ziofill 2y ago

I love that the mobile version of the brave browser tells you how much data it saved you and how much time too.

TechDebtDevin 2y ago
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.
- erinaceousjones 2y ago
  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.
0xpgm 2y ago
I agree, that is a pretty good feature. You start feeling good when the data saved is in the gigabytes and time saved viewing ads is in the hours
smoovb 2y ago
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.
theandrewbailey 2y ago
Desktop Brave does, too.
deleted 2y ago

metabagel 2y ago

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.

Bancakes 2y ago
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.
- samtheprogram 2y ago
  I was trying to figure out why this doesn’t happen to me, and it’s probably AdGuard. Highly recommended.
- encom 2y ago
  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.
  - bcraven 2y ago
    Firefox on Android supports extensions so I have uBlock running.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Firefox on Android does work and does run uBlock Origin all right. 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.
    - encom 2y ago
      But how long is manifest v2 going to survive on Firefox?

vrc 2y ago

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.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown

freitasm 2y ago

I think ads on mobile apps is a much bigger problem for these users.

RiverCrochet 2y ago

"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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Good one!

__rito__ 2y ago

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.

staplar 2y ago

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

stalfosknight 2y ago

Some people still don't have unlimited data?

foobarchu 2y ago
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.

corysama 2y ago

AFAIK, a lot of mobile ad blockers work by proxying your traffic through their servers. 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.

david_allison 2y ago
uBlock Origin is supported by Firefox on Android: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...
ghostly_s 2y ago
> 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.
redwall_hp 2y ago
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.
CubsFan1060 2y ago
1Blocker works quite well as well.
the_snooze 2y ago
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.

modeless 2y ago

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."

potsandpans 2y ago
I think I'll pass.
techsupporter 2y ago
Does it have an in-frame modal that pops up immediately after page load to beg me for my email address? 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!!
- jl6 2y ago
  Popups onmouseout, recaptcha handwritten Newsletter signup, location permission Video covering every thing These are my favorite adtech offsprings
- modeless 2y ago
  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.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    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.

jcoletti 2y ago

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.

apples_oranges 2y ago

Install Brave browser. You probably won’t go back if you try it.

pier25 2y ago

It's immoral that you cannot turn off videos in a browser and/or that this isn't the default option on phones.

drukenemo 2y ago
I use Stopthemadness to stop video autoplay
- musicale 2y ago
  The fact that we need a "stop the madness" app for Safari is proof of Safari's insanity. If Stopthemadness actually works reliably, it is also an existence proof that blocking video autoplay is possible, and that Apple is simply not fixing the "never auto-play" setting in Safari. Perhaps Apple and Mozilla should just remove the "never auto-play" settings in Safari and Firefox and say that they are doing so in order to empower web sites and adtech companies (including Google/youtube, who pays them a lot of money) to force you to view unwanted video advertisements.
musicale 2y ago
I agree. It's insanely user-hostile that the "never auto-play" setting in Safari (for example) doesn't work and hasn't worked for years. To be honest, I have no recollection of it ever working reliably. Although it is an arms race and obnoxious web pages can have javascript/webassembly video players that render into a canvas, etc., I still blame Apple for not sorting this out, and even backtracking on click/tap-to-play. IIRC, at some point Apple did roll out default click/tap-to-play on iPhones, and there was a huge outcry from web developers (probably including Google/youtube) that it broke their sites. I expect the real complaint was that it interfered with pushing unwanted video advertisements.
carlosjobim 2y ago
You can do that easily on iOS.
catlikesshrimp 2y ago
You probably mean "iphones" Android firefox does have an option to turn off autoplay (video and sound) It can't be set as default because most people are used to spam ads. Heck, most people seek them on tictok

aschla 2y ago

A solution: AdGuardHome and WireGuard running at home. WireGuard connects on-demand when I leave home. I choose to run it at home because there are cases where services and/or sites block datacenter IPs, and I have complete control over what and how I block, no proxying through any blocking service.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
A solution for you and some other tech savvy individuals; not a great solution for the rest of my family. Plus, it ignores the systemic problem in exchange for personal one-off bandaids.
- aschla 2y ago
  A one-off solution like this is really the only type of solution we have in the face of a massive ad tech industry that largely piggybacks on top of, and inserts itself into, foundational network and web protocols. Fixing the problem itself would likely require legislation and regulation to get ad tech companies (or the companies that use the ad tech) to pay attention to the data use.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    So, there are two solutions - one-off bandaids, and legislation.
- j45 2y ago
  Many homes can run whole their route. Im curious how much time or money you’d be willing to invest and spend monthly to have this solved simply?
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Homes, sure - what about mobile devices? What about the rest of my family who's not at home? What about the sysadmin work I'll have to put in to support this?

linsomniac 2y ago

Only half? The number of pages I load that have a video playing in them would make me think it's way, way higher than that.

znpy 2y ago

I assume the worst offender in this is youtube. It’s awful because ads ALWAYS load immediately, but the actual media i want to watch always lags or is buffering. When i’m on mobile data advertisements are always super clear and in super high resolution, but i often get pushed low-res versions of the media. I really hope some better company comes and dismantles YouTube as a business. Edit: i’m using plain YouTube on plain iOS, so it’s all on google/YouTube.

everdrive 2y ago

Honestly, just stop using your phone most of the time. You can try to keep up with the adblocking arms race, but it is ultimately a losing battle. It's not actually difficult (in principle) to avoid mobile ads: don't use your phone in the first place, don't browse to web pages, and don't install apps. For anyone who says "but what if I'm out and I need to?" -- that's a fine exception if you're not actually using your phone the other 99% of the time.

blueboo 2y ago
Considering we have 25 years of adtech and we presently have multiple effective solutions for adblocking on mobile and desktop, I’d need some additional evidence to be sure that is “ultimately a losing battle”.
- everdrive 2y ago
  So I consider myself to be pretty aggressive compared to the normal user when it comes to adblocking. I use Pihole, pfsense (just some blocking IP lists), ublock origin + custom filters & lists, noscript, and also just have a firm household policy about unavoidable ads. (companies have a "1 strike you're out" policy in my household for anything egregious. Spotify earned a lifetime ban probably over a decade ago. It's likely the original offense has not been relevant for years, but I don't care. They're out of the running permanently.) That said, there's a lot of time and energy keeping up with what works, and what does not in the ecosystem. From the pfsense (ie, IP blocking) side of things I'm wholly dependent on filter list authors -- and of course IP blocking ads is marginally effective at best. From the pihole side of things, you have similar problems: dependency on domain lists, and the ever-looming threat of server-side ads. The only reason pihole (or any DNS-based blocking in general) is not wholly useless is because it represents a minority of users. If the technique were even marginally popular, the industry would move on and render it almost totally useless. uBlock origin suffers similar problems, and of course Google has moved to neuter it via Manifest v3. They are also in something of a tug of way with Youtube, and I get the sense that if they really wanted to, they could easily circumvent the plugin. As could any other website. I'm not really worried about losing Youtube, mind you, but it feels pretty clearly that the door is closing on the ad-free internet. And worse, the time when the users on the internet had more power than corporations is dying with it.

ausaus 2y ago

On Android I use Firefox with uBlock Origin and adguard DNS as a private DNS.

kivle 2y ago

Worst example I've seen is an app called Foodora here in Norway (like Uber Eats, Door Dash, etc). On the order confirmation page where you're following your order status, following the driver on the map, etc, they would have video ads playing _uncached_. It was literally using like 1 MB/s of traffic continuously while you were checking the order page.

crazygringo 2y ago

Surprising they don't mention what I imagine has to be the obvious culprit: video ads. It's not even about advertising for me -- static ads don't bother me that much. But whenever there's autoplaying video in the corner of a page, I hate it so much. Whether it's an ad, or a news site that inexplicably thinks I want to multitask and watch their news channel at the same time I read their article. It's genuinely hard to read the article when there's constant motion an inch or two away at all times!

catlikesshrimp 2y ago
Firefox has an option to turn autoplay (sound and video) off for those ads that get past ublock origin.
- schiffern 2y ago
  uBlock Origin can also block media elements larger than X MB (I use 8 MB so it still loads large images), preventing the video from loading in the first place. Disabling autoplay prevents it from playing, but the video is still downloaded.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    Does this actually work? Most videos on the internet aren't loaded as one large file, but as sequence of short few-second long chunks.
- pornel 2y ago
  Ads work around lack of autoplay by loading massive image filmstrips containing video frames (often split across hundreds of image files), and animating that in JS or CSS. This has all the annoyance of autoplay, with even worse bandwidth and memory usage.
alden5 2y ago
That's your monkey brain hard at work making sure you notice movement that could mean danger in your peripheral vision, funny how much technology is built off of manipulating primal parts of our brains

ngcazz 2y ago

If we're losing net neutrality then ad traffic should be entirely financed by ISPs

syntaxing 2y ago

Paying $20 a year for NextDNS is easily my top value purchase. Makes browsing on iOS a sane experience.

nytesky 2y ago

Let’s take the moment to hat tip Hacker News for no ads!

imoreno 2y ago

Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.

Workaccount2 2y ago
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
- rlpb 2y ago
  > The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. I disagree. The value I get from the Internet is almost entirely from non-ad-driven sources. The ad-driven stuff is very low value to me.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    you never used google search? if not you should check it out - it is not bad - https://www.google.com https://www.google.com
    - xigoi 2y ago
      I prefer Kagi, which does not have ads.
      - t0bia_s 2y ago
        But you have to pay for it and link your credit card with it. Which is privacy nightmare. I have whatever search engine without ads for free. uBlock + NextDNS do the job.
    - lukan 2y ago

papavancato 2y ago

Got attacked by two ads immediately at opening the page

luuurker 2y ago

[dead]

dawnerd 2y ago

Ad people also don’t even care about best practices. Many times years ago we’d see multi meg static banner ads. The situation isn’t better today, massive gifs are still used in place of video.

hinkley 2y ago
Few things are more soul crushing than having a VP of CTO mandate a bunch of metrics for page size and load time and then to have someone load up all your hard work with trackers, analytics and ads. Like what was the point of us doing all this now the page loads in five seconds so you can be nosey?

hinkley 2y ago

iOS Safari has a setting that can use another app to do privacy controls and you can set Firefox Focus to be that app. It’s very nice. I got tired of how slow pages were loading on my phone, and got fed up one day and turned it on. That and ads that resize and push down the content you’re about to click on to make you misclick were the final straws.

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

maxwellg 2y ago

I finally took the time this weekend to get the family switched over to using NextDNS. I use uBlock Origin on my laptop but it's nice to have something for mobile too. I've been getting heated when my partner hands me her phone to show me a recipe and it's completely covered in ads.

ifdefdebug 2y ago
> but it's nice to have something for mobile too what's wrong with uBlock Origin on mobile? (available in Firefox)
- ornornor 2y ago
  iOS and ad-blocking in apps that aren’t Firefox on android

zzo38computer 2y ago

It is not only the data amount but also power. Those who display ads on your computer are stealing these things from you, so they are the thieves. However, it is not only the ads, but also other stuff, such as spyware, inefficient programming, excessive animations and fancy effects, etc.

gwern 2y ago

Original is https://www.endersanalysis.com/reports/blocking-free-world-threat-online-ad-blocking https://www.endersanalysis.com/reports/blocking-free-world-t... but paywalled.

deleted 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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ornornor 2y ago

If you have an iPhone, NextDNS is free/very cheap and blocks all ads everywhere (except in the YT app, for this you need to route the YT traffic over to Albania, they get no YT ads there for some reason)

pvtmert 2y ago

I think the title needs 2016 since nowadays many ads transitioned from just pictures to even videos. Consisting much more than the text I read... I would even argue this is a larger issue than the JS bloat websites are having...

throawayonthe 2y ago

[dead]

t0bia_s 2y ago

Wireguard devices to home, where Pi-hole and NextDNS filter all ads. Noone in my family saw an ad over few years. It's always shock to se how many ads grandparents has in TV, especially for kids that are rised in adfree environment.

SergeAx 2y ago

I wonder how much data are eaten by analytics and telemetry.

nipperkinfeet 2y ago

Not on my devices. Adguard DNS with Firefox and uBlock on desktop and Android phone.