Energy conservation with open source ad blockers

Authors

Joshua M. Pearce, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-30-2020

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Department of Materials Science and Engineering

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.

Publisher's Statement

© 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies8020018

Publication Title

Technologies

Recommended Citation

Pearce, J. (2020). Energy conservation with open source ad blockers. Technologies, 8(2). http://doi.org/10.3390/technologies8020018
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/2590

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF