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Now that ad-blockers are on iOS I'm considering buying one.

I should preface this with what I do on my personal computers:
1. I don't have an add blocker on primary browser, if I go to a site with annoying ads I use a different browser that does have an ad blocker.
2. I don't mind the slight extra loading, etc. As ads do keep most sites running, at least partially.
3. Unless the site displays whole page ads, etc. I rarely use the 2nd browser.

Now, for mobile. My issue with ads here as by killing them I get:
1. less performance is used by the phone.
2. use less data.
3. hurt sites that I read and enjoy.
4. A lot of sites use ads that are terrible in mobile from my experience.
5. the phone gets more battery life for multiple of the above reasons

However, it's just to much. Less data and more battery life are essentially money saving "features".

I suppose the real question is, does anyone know if the ad-blockers coming on iOS have a white-list feature? From the little I've read the answer seems to be no.


I don't want to block ads (for most sites) just, on a phone, there are so many benefits. And the benefits can be large in terms of data usage. Anandtech, for example, shows the ad-blocker saving 2.5MB of data visiting their site. Claiming that people have been looking into data savings and finding 3.5MB+ on many sites.


At least here I can always donate a bit of money and feel okay for having used an ad-blocker. Just. Ugh. I hate depriving content creators of the money that is used to create their content.

Wouldn't it make more sense to blacklist the sites that have a large number of image and video ads rather than whitelist the sites that don't?

DrDominodog51 wrote:

Wouldn't it make more sense to blacklist the sites that have a large number of image and video ads rather than whitelist the sites that don't?

All data is valuable, for mobile I would much prefer a whitelist. For desktop, I believe a blacklist is the way to go.


1MB here, 2MB there, etc. All ads up in terms of:
power to render
power to send/receive data
and also the amount of data.

I suppose that makes sense if you were to hypothetically* install ad blocker on mobile.


* Yes, I threw that in there for you Ned and JBI

I think there's a somewhat convoluted method of whitelisting in Purify. Not sure if you were considering that one.

Ad-blocking on mobile has become almost mandatory.

Mobile-versions of a site used to mean "optimised for small screens and low bandwidth"

Now it just means "hey, throw up annoying prompts to install our dedicated app rather than using our website, popups galore because it's much harder to accurately hit the tiny close button on a phone and hey, every time you swipe to scroll we'll register that as an ad-click and spawn a new window because we're asshats and need to maximise our pay-per-click revenue more than you need to read our content!"

Seriously, there have been a few articles about out-of-control advertisers and greedy site owners causing their own demise recently; The era of free internet is already ending and what we're left with is contentless linkbait on one side and a paywall on the other.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Ad-blocking on mobile has become almost mandatory.

Mobile-versions of a site used to mean "optimised for small screens and low bandwidth"

Now it just means "hey, throw up annoying prompts to install our dedicated app rather than using our website, popups galore because it's much harder to accurately hit the tiny close button on a phone and hey, every time you swipe to scroll we'll register that as an ad-click and spawn a new window because we're asshats and need to maximise our pay-per-click revenue more than you need to read our content!"

Seriously, there have been a few articles about out-of-control advertisers and greedy site owners causing their own demise recently; The era of free internet is already ending and what we're left with is contentless linkbait on one side and a paywall on the other.

I've actually measured faster loading times for a few sites when requestion the desktop version.