Ads responsible for 2/3s of internet traffic in Europe

[Yogurth]

Ads drive most Internet traffic in Europe

 

By Sead Fadilpašić

 

 

With all the buzz and fuss over ad blockers and how they hurt the internet we know today, it's interesting to see just how much traffic these ads actually drive. As it turns out, more than you'd expect. According to a new report by Adobe Digital Insights, more than two thirds (68 percent) of all European traffic is driven by ads. General traffic is also growing. In Europe, more than half (54 percent) of sites grew their traffic in the last three years.

Also, mobile advertising is catching up. Personal advertising, an ads strategy which seems to be working quite nicely, is not as popular in Europe as it is in the States, the same report says. Personalized ads, such as direct emails or social advertising, accounted for 36 percent of new traffic for growing U.S. websites. In Europe, that percentage is at eight.

 

Source

 

 

 

[The Evil Overlord]

Screw em, the more they force ads on us, the harder my stance on blockers

 

[Danielx64]

15 minutes ago, The Evil Overlord said:

Screw em, the more they force ads on us, the harder my stance on blockers

 

That's why I use adguard to block ads, they eat too much data (let alone the security issues too).

[john_alex]

Online advertising = making free money by forcing end users to pay for the bandwidth. I'll block everything until they do something about it or start paying me. 

 

A good example is Neowin's homepage:

 

without ad blocking => 15.6 Mb and rising, 1253 http requests to hundreds of trackers (i re-enabled the ad blocker after 5 minutes to stop all this) while my I5 cpu was running at about 80%.

with ad blocking => 2.3 Mb, 123 requests, everything loaded in less than 3 seconds and the cpu load never went beyond 6%

[Danielx64]

1 minute ago, john_alex said:

Online advertising = making free money by forcing end users to pay for the bandwidth. I'll block everything until they do something about it or start paying me. 

 

A good example is Neowin's homepage:

 

without ad blocking => 15.6 Mb and rising, 1253 http requests to hundreds of trackers (i re-enabled the ad blocker after 5 minutes to stop all this) while my I5 cpu was running at about 80%.

with ad blocking => 2.3 Mb, 123 requests, everything loaded in less than 3 seconds and the cpu load never went beyond 6%

There you go @Steven P.and @Barney T. eat that.

[cork1958]

5 minutes ago, john_alex said:

Online advertising = making free money by forcing end users to pay for the bandwidth. I'll block everything until they do something about it or start paying me. 

 

A good example is Neowin's homepage:

 

without ad blocking => 15.6 Mb and rising, 1253 http requests to hundreds of trackers (i re-enabled the ad blocker after 5 minutes to stop all this) while my I5 cpu was running at about 80%.

with ad blocking => 2.3 Mb, 123 requests, everything loaded in less than 3 seconds and the cpu load never went beyond 6%

And if you're on anything even close to an older machine, you should see how long it takes this site to load without an adblocker! Next to useless then!

 

Thank you ublock origin!!

[Yogurth]

Where are the good old days of torrents sucking up the internet

[T3X4S]

Not saying anything - all the mods hate me already.

[Danielx64]

3 minutes ago, T3X4S said:

Not saying anything - all the mods hate me already.

Awww why? PM me if you like, I won't bite 

[T3X4S]

Oh, not about what you said - I meant badmouthing european content providers, ads, neowin, Steven, etc...

It was going to be a joke, but- since they dont like me, I wasnt going to joke... (but now they know)

 

[Hum]

glad you don't depend on poRn

[Danielx64]

2 minutes ago, T3X4S said:

It was going to be a joke, but- since they dont like me, I wasnt going to joke... (but now they know)

I don't think the founders like me because I block ads and refuse to pay up for a subscription. They don't (IMO anyway) understand that cutting income is the only reason why people block ads. Remember the topic that one of the new writers started?

1 minute ago, Hum said:

glad you don't depend on poRn

Got no need for that dirty stuff.

[satysin]

Which is why everyone should use uBlock Origin and uMatrix. Not only do they remove all of the bloated and content ruining ads but they also easily allow you to block third party resources (scripts, frames, etc.) which makes you safer and speeds up heavy sites by several orders of magnitude. 

 

Web ads have brought this on themselves. They destroy the web. Their extremely aggressive push to be in as many parts of a page as possible and zero effort to be safe means I will block everything now without exception. Yes I know a few sites try and do well placed ads but the reality is when they rely on a third party ad service they don't control the ads and that is unacceptable to me. I rather the content stops being free than run the risk associated with displaying ads.  

[T3X4S]

 (whats the easy way to make my attachments @ full size ?)

Sorry - but now I cant believe anything you ever say...ever.
I understand if you are legally blind, and using internet via braille - but...

All kidding aside, Im torn on the whole adblock thing.

I have ublock origin installed on everything, but have a bunch of sites whitelisted (for function sake)

I see how a legit, decent company/site would have a complaint about having their legs taken out from under them in terms of revenue, and how bad sites ruin it for everyone. - I get that.

[Yogurth]

After years of using urlfilter.ini in Opera Presto and corresponding fanboy's .css, I got spoiled and from what I have tried and used none of the adblockers made for Chromium or Firefox offer that kind of efficiency. So around the time when I switched fully to Vivaldi I started using hosts instead of adblockers. IMHO it is a safer way of blocking ads, circumventing almost anything that might get attached to the browser ... with the downside of not being able to whitelist some of the sites. The only thing that would be superior is to get those ~30 000 addresses somehow into Router Firewall.

[Biohead]

10 minutes ago, Yogurth said:

<snip>... The only thing that would be superior is to get those ~30 000 addresses somehow into Router Firewall.

Have you ever looked into a Raspberry Pi running pi-hole? It's essentially turns the pi into a local DNS server - if you setup DHCP on the router properly you can get it so that all devices on your local network use it without having to touch the devices themselves. It also gives you lots of stats on the traffic and you can see just how many ads are going through the network.

[Yogurth]

2 minutes ago, Biohead said:

Have you ever looked into a Raspberry Pi running pi-hole? It's essentially turns the pi into a local DNS server - if you setup DHCP on the router properly you can get it so that all devices on your local network use it without having to touch the devices themselves. It also gives you lots of stats on the traffic and you can see just how many ads are going through the network.

Thx for the suggestion, It never occurred to me to use Raspberry Pi, very interesting indeed.

[The Evil Overlord]

If websites want to push ads to the extreme, then there's no point crying when consumers push equally hard with blocking add ons.

 

The other extreme being to not go online again.

 

But I'd bet they'd find whether or not it's possible to push ads onto sat nav devices

 

OK, that's my tin foil hat post for the day.