Tests of top 50 news sites with three ad-blockers on iPhone show significant decrease in load times for many sites, modest increase in battery life
Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test — To block ads or not to block ads on your mobile device? That's the philosophical dilemma …
Context & Ripple Effects
This test quantifies what the ad-blocker wave has been arguing all along. In July, Monday Note measured just how bloated news pages had become — the New York Times taking four minutes and 2MB to render one story — and by late September blockers had surged to the top of the App Store while some publishers began hiding content from blocker users (publishers fighting back by hiding content). Two days before this piece ran, Marketing Land reported iOS ad blockers already beginning to drop in popularity, making hard performance numbers timely ammunition for both sides.
The significance of testing specifically on iPhone is scale: Apple's platform was where the blocker boom started, so measuring load times and battery drain across the top 50 news sites turns an ideological fight into an engineering one.
First-order effects
- Readers using the three tested blockers see significantly faster loads on many of the top-50 news sites plus a modest battery gain, while those same publishers lose ad impressions and page-weight-driven revenue on every blocked visit.
Second-order effects
- Publishers whose sites measure slow under blocking face pressure to either lighten pages or escalate countermeasures — the hiding-content playbook already in play — and the arms race later shows up in code: by the end of 2017, 30.5% of the Alexa top 10K run anti-ad-blocking measures, much of it hidden from visitors (hidden anti-ad-blocking code).
Third-order effects
- If blocking keeps compounding at the user level, the endpoint visible in later data is blocking moving into the browser itself — PageFair counted 419M mobile adblock users, up 90% year-on-year, with 36% adoption in Asia-Pacific — forcing publishers toward formats and channels ads can't be stripped from (browsers that block ads automatically).
The trend: Mobile advertising is being forced to justify its page weight, as measured performance gaps push blocking from a niche extension into default browser behavior and publishers respond with detection and countermeasures rather than lighter pages.