The New York Times explains why iPhone ad blockers are great

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

last updated 1 October 2015

With iOS 9, iPhone and iPad users can for the first time block ads while browsing the web. That poses a "philosophical dilemma" for consumers, since lots of beloved news and entertainment sites rely on ads to finance their content creation, notes Brian X. Chen at The New York Times. This presumably includes Chen's employer, but he rated three of the ad blockers anyway, explained how to set them up, and extolled their virtues at improving your reading experience, data usage, and battery life.

Not all websites eat data usage and your precious time equally, Chen notes, and serendipitously, one of the biggest beneficiaries of ad blockers was a site The New York Times sold in 2013:

The benefits of ad blockers stood out the most when loading the Boston.com website. With ads, that home page on average measured 19.4 megabytes; with ads removed using Crystal or Purify, it measured four megabytes, and with 1Blocker, it measured 4.5 megabytes. On a 4G network, this translated to the page taking 39 seconds to load with ads and eight seconds to load without ads. [The New York Times]

Chen says that he's not trying to destroy the news media, arguing that "ad blockers increase transparency into the different paths that publishers take when integrating ads into their websites." Some of the apps let you choose which sites to support by allowing their ads, he notes, and "some publishers appear to carefully consider how ads affect the performance of your device, while others either do not care or lack the resources to do so." You can read more about the benefits of ad blockers at The New York Times, and feel free, of course, to whitelist TheWeek.com.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.