Energy Conservation with Open Source Ad Blockers

Abstract

Internet-related electricity consumption is rising rapidly as global Internet users spend more than 6.5 h per day online. Open source ad blockers have the potential to reduce the time and thus electricity spent using computers by eliminating ads during Internet browsing and video streaming. In this study, three open source ad blockers are tested against a no-ad blocker control. Page load time is recorded for browsing a representative selection of the globally most-accessed websites, and the time spent watching ads on videos is quantified for both trending and non-trending content. The results show that page load time dropped 11% with AdBlock+, 22.2% with Privacy Badger, and 28.5% with uBlock Origin. Thus, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually. The energy conserved if everyone in the United States used the open source ad blocker would save over 36 Americans lives per year if it were to offset coal-fired electricity generated-based pollution. In the United States, if all Internet users enabled Privacy Badger on their computers, Americans would save more than $91 million annually. Globally, uBlock Origin could save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year. Open source ad blockers are a potentially effective technology for energy conservation.

Client‐side energy and GHGs assessment of advertising and tracking in the news websites

“…Our mixed‐device figures are certainly more comparable with those of Pearce (2020), another study which uses time‐based allocation. Pearce (2020) estimates that using uBO would save 13.5 TWh per year (12.63 TWh in our mixed‐device ) and, when corrected for our higher global average residential electricity price of 0.226 USD (PPP)/kWh, 2.9 billion USD (PPP) (2.85 billion USD (PPP) in our mixed‐device ).…”

“…Our mixed‐device figures are certainly more comparable with those of Pearce (2020), another study which uses time‐based allocation. Pearce (2020) estimates that using uBO would save 13.5 TWh per year (12.63 TWh in our mixed‐device ) and, when corrected for our higher global average residential electricity price of 0.226 USD (PPP)/kWh, 2.9 billion USD (PPP) (2.85 billion USD (PPP) in our mixed‐device ). Saying that our results are close would however be misleading, because of some differences between the studies: The size and nature of the sample, as well as its geographical distribution: 80% of the websites sampled in Pearce (2020) are from the United States, compared to our 23%. The geographical location from which the experiment was conducted: all our samples were gathered in Italy.…”

“…We indirectly addressed 4) in the "Desktop vs laptop" section. 5) means our estimates are actually close to twice as big as the ones in Pearce (2020). This can probably be attributed to 3), to our sample and to the fact that the mixed-device scenario we used is not conservative, unlike our more accurate baseline scenario.…”

“…In comparison with previous studies which tried to estimate the environmental impacts of online ads, our study brings the novelty of implementing a client‐side, time‐allocating (unlike Pärssinen et al., 2018), entirely software‐based (and not equation‐based like Pearce, 2020) bottom‐up methodology for appraising energy usage by computer programs. Particularly, our contribution is threefold: (i) to establish an entirely software‐based reproducible methodology for assessing energy use by computer programs using exclusively free/libre and open source software (FLOSS); (ii) to identify the client‐side environmental impacts (and their economic effects) for the popular news category of websites; (iii) to provide further empirical evidence that consumer choices can affect positively the environment.…”

The Economics of Classroom 3-D Printing of Open-Source Digital Designs of Learning Aids

“…It is estimated that the markups for retailers were 10% for Costco, 15% for Amazon, 32% for Walmart and 46% for Target [86]. The costs for advertising and marketing are completely eliminated for the self-fabrication model, while advertising represents a time cost and source of frustration for consumers who attempt to protect their time [87] (e.g., some of the most popular plugins for both Firefox [88] and Chrome Internet browsers [89] are for ad blocking software, which have been downloaded tens of millions of times and have saved consumers enormous amounts of time and money by conserving energy to run their computers to service ads [90]). The management costs to run large corporations have swollen [91,92] even when the company is failing [93] and, again, these are not needed in the distributed model.…”