Ad blockers help users browse faster and save money: NYT report

A new study points out that iOS ad blockers could actually help users save time and money, apart from eliminating annoying ads.

Apple just started allowing ad blockers into its iOS ecosystem in September, with the launch of its latest iOS 9, marking a notable first that generated much interest.

Shortly afterwards blockers topped the charts for iOS paid apps, pointing to the massive demand for such software.

It turns out that with ad blockers users can not only surf the web without distractions, but ad blockers also allowed them to browse much faster and conserve their data. This in turn meant savings of both time and money.

With iOS ad blockers gaining popularity, the New York Times (NYT) decided to look into the matter.

"We decided to put multiple ad blockers to the test. Over the course of four days, we used several ad-blocking apps on our iPhones and measured how much the programs cut down on web page data sizes and improved loading times, and also how much they increased the smartphone's battery life," NYT reported.

After thorough assessment, the NYT recently released its study on the effect of iOS ad blockers when browsing through the top 50 news websites, including its own.

"More than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers. Not all of the news websites were equal," reveals the study.

''For a number of websites that contained mobile ads with a lot of data, Web page data sizes decreased significantly and load times accelerated enormously with ad blockers turned on,'' according to The New York Times. ''The iPhone's battery life also improved - but more modestly - with ads removed.''

The home page of Boston.com, for example, was 19.4MB with ads enabled. With Crystal and Purify, it was reduced to 4MB; with 1Blocker, it was reduced to 4.5MB. ''On a 4G network, this translated to the page taking 39 seconds to load with ads and 8 seconds to load without ads,'' according to The New York Times.

When iOS 9 was announced, it was found that within Safari, Apple had allowed developers to create apps that could potentially block display of certain types of content, such as ads. (See: Apple's ad blocking feature raises hackles of digital publishers).