Publishers' sites bloated with advertising, says adblocking study
A new survey of publisher’s mobile sites has warned that many are ‘bloated’ with advertising, with as much as 79 per cent of data downloads relating to advertising.
Enders Analysis found that between 18 and 79 per cent of data usage on six ‘popular publishers’ could be classed as marketing content rather than editorial and typically accounted for around half of all processing for people reading articles on their phone.
Moreover between 6 and 68 per cent of this additional data was in JavaScript form, used by publishers and advertisers to deliver interactive content.
The report authors said: “On the basis of this investigation, an estimate that says advertising accounts for half of all data used by publisher pages on iPhones does not look unreasonable. Publisher mobile pages are bloated, and advertising is an enormous part of that.”
Enders commissioned the work as part of an ongoing study into ad blocking which it estimates is now in use by between 10 and 20 per cent of UK web users frustrated by intrusive advertising – as well as security, privacy and data limit concerns.