Putting Mobile Ad Blockers to the Test

It's a pity that all these articles comparing iOS ad blockers look only at the paid apps, some of which have some dubious backgrounds (like selling out to whitelist specific sites). A comparison with free ad blockers would do a whole lot of good instead.

I'm not surprised they specifically call out boston.com

I've been reading that site weekly / daily for a few years now. On Desktop browsers its pretty painless (with an ad blocker on), but recently on my ipad the usability of the site has dropped to zero.

It constantly loads an ad that redirects me to the app store, while my browser sits on a blank page. If you hit the back button, boom forward to blank page, context switch to App store.

And the apps it wanted me to download were highly questionable in nature.

I'm amazed that a site of that high of brand recognition would stoop to that level (auto-redirect to crappy app store app). Will be finding a new site for my Boston news after that.

Mobile does not mean Apple, which is what the entire article is about.

I thought it was ironic that they called out Boston.com. Until a few years ago, The New York Times owned Boston.com (online domain for The Boston Globe). Back to New York/Boston rivalry as usual?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Globe: "The company was acquired in 1993 by The New York Times Company; two years later Boston.com was established as the newspaper's online edition. In 2011, a BostonGlobe.com subscription site was launched. In 2013, the newspaper and websites were purchased by John W. Henry, a businessman whose other holdings include the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool F.C."

Would be interested to find an ad blocker that is aware of my available bandwidth. If I'm using my phone/phablet on 3G/EDGE connection then block ads (especially on the kind of ad payload being reported in this article). But when I'm at home on fast Wifi connection then I'll take the additional bandwidth to display the ad as my part of the bargain on reading the content.

I'm not too sure about the methodology of their battery test - presumably if they loaded the web pages in an endless loop an ad blocker would just result in more page requests in the same timeframe (causing more data to be downloaded and more processing time to be used).

Hmm... so is nytimes conspicuously missing from that list or did I miss it?

The guardian gets more and more of my respect every day, not just for the lack of ads, but for the depth and choice of their articles - that's one publication I would not mind paying for.

So iOS ad-blockers only work in the browser? They don't block ads in apps?