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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Sudoku medium: August 23, 2025The Week's daily medium sudoku puzzle
-
Florida erases rainbow crosswalk at Pulse nightclubSpeed Read The colorful crosswalk was outside the former LGBTQ nightclub where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting
-
Trump says Smithsonian too focused on slavery's illsSpeed Read The president would prefer the museum to highlight 'success,' 'brightness' and 'the future'
-
Trump to host Kennedy Honors for Kiss, StalloneSpeed Read Actor Sylvester Stallone and the glam-rock band Kiss were among those named as this year's inductees
-
White House seeks to bend Smithsonian to Trump's viewSpeed Read The Smithsonian Institution's 21 museums are under review to ensure their content aligns with the president's interpretation of American history
-
Charlamagne Tha God irks Trump with Epstein talkSpeed Read The radio host said the Jeffrey Epstein scandal could help 'traditional conservatives' take back the Republican Party
-
CBS cancels Colbert's 'Late Show'Speed Read 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' is ending next year
-
A long weekend in ZürichThe Week Recommends The vibrant Swiss city is far more than just a banking hub
-
Shakespeare not an absent spouse, study proposesspeed read A letter fragment suggests that the Shakespeares lived together all along, says scholar Matthew Steggle
