iPad mini with Retina display (left) vs. iPad Air (right)
It used to be that while you could block ads on the desktop, blocking ads on mobile wasn’t so straightforward, at least until in the past couple of years where there are various tools released for different platforms that helps block mobile ads. Apart from mobile ads potentially being disruptive, it seems that there is now another reason to block them.
According to a study conducted by Enders Analysis last month, they found that there are some cases in which mobile ads actually end up consuming more data than the actual web page itself. Based on their finds, mobile ads were responsible for as low as 18% of data transferred, and up to a whopping 79%.
Now it should be noted that this study wasn’t particularly comprehensive as it was only conducted on 8 unnamed news websites. This means that for all we know, these websites could be using ad networks that were inefficient with its assets, hence the data-hungry ads. Alternatively it could suggest the potential for mobile ads to be particularly data intensive.
There have been a lot of criticisms directed at web ads, but as it remains many a publisher’s way of generating revenue, there’s not much to be done, although companies like Google have announced that they are looking to make improvements to them.
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