We’ve posted a series of articles noting why safety and privacy are causes for the rise of mobile ad blockers. Now, we look at data. It’s common knowledge that ads are data-intensive, but would you wager a guess as to how much? Enders Analysis did a small experiment measuring news sites’ data distribution. Up to 79% of that data was attributable to advertisements.

The researchers said that ads could take up half of mobile data. This corresponds with research that ad blockers reduce data by about 50%. Arguing morality is becoming more and more fallacious; there is money lost by both sites and users. In the chart above, almost all of the ads carried a size in megabytes. Most cellular data plans start off at about 300 megabytes per month; a hypothetical user would have to limit their browsing to very few pages to be able to watch videos or send photos over data. The 8.1 MB outlier above was caused by a video, and its ads could constitute an entire page!

Data has become integrated with professional and personal lives, and advertisements should not command a majority of internet data for mobile users. Google and Facebook are aware of this; they’ve both introduced their respective AMP and Canvas initiatives to reduce data bloat. Both are limited to sites that adopt them and are, as of now, very conceptual. It’s going to be a long time before this problem is fixed.

In the meantime, try AdClear if you’re an Android user. It doesn’t involve rooting the phone, and it’s the only ad blocker of its kind that blocks encrypted ads. That means YouTube ads and ads delivered over HTTPS. The best part is: it’s free. Try it now from our website.