New York – In late September, Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) first added support for ad blockers in their iPhone operating system that was supposed to make websites load faster and conserve data.
On Monday, the New York Times released a study on 50 ad-blocking apps on iPhone when they measured how much the programs cut down on web page data sizes, improved loading times, and increased the smartphone’s battery life. These programs have always been available for PC and are just now being introduced in iPhones and iPads. They basically block the ads that sometimes appear when you’re looking at a website in Apple’s Safari mobile browser.
“It’s just to improve websites in general and the advertising issues. It’s mostly about performance,” said Dean Murphy, who developed the ad-blocking app Crystal to the New York Times.
Why is it controversial?
Most websites and media companies basically live thanks to online advertising. The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, from small blogs to magazines depend on ads to pay for the work of writers and editors. Even when these ad blockers have been available for some time on PC, now being included in Apple, one of the biggest and most influencing technology companies in the world certainly raises worries.
The New York Times released a study and measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.
How much does it cost?
The study confirmed that many websites loaded faster and felt easier to use when using ad blockers. Also when relating to mobile data, the New York Times concluded that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte costs about a penny due to advertisements.
“Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads,” the NY Times read.
Source: The New York Times