Adblock Plus and (a little) more

University students validate LSD Project · 2015-07-08 14:15 by Ben Williams

It’s not what you’re thinking.

The University is British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, where students tested Adblock Plus on a live department network and measured enormous (25 to 40 percent) reductions in IP traffic when Adblock Plus is installed on the endpoint computers.

The LSD Project is our Large Scale Deployment project, through which we developed the Adblock Plus for Administrators feature. We started including this a few weeks back in the latest update for Chrome. This feature lets network admins easily deploy Adblock Plus across large scale networks, like those found in universities, schools and companies of all sizes.

Simon Fraser University published the results of their research in a report entitled Adblock Plus Efficacy Study, which demonstrated that installing Adblock Plus on network endpoints saves bandwidth — 25 percent bandwidth savings by blocking web-based advertisements and 40 percent bandwidth savings when also blocking video trailers.

Research methodology

The research study was conducted from March 15, 2015 to May 1, 2015 with 103 students participating. A portion of the university computer network was configured with computers divided by those running Adblock Plus and those without Adblock Plus. All computers were part of a flat network with gateway provided by a Palo Alto VM-100 firewall. The Palo Alto firewall provided application layer visibility into network traffic. Since all traffic traversed the firewall this methodology provided extremely accurate data analysis on the type and volume of traffic. Students were instructed to surf among a designated basket of URLs (see infographic above), mimicking how they would perform research for a paper or casually surf. They were required to spend at least 5-15 minutes on each site.

Computers running the Adblock Plus browser extension saw a 25 percent decrease in associated total data usage during web-browsing sessions. The trend was even more pronounced when http-video sessions were taken in isolation; computers running Adblock Plus revealed a cumulative 40 percent decrease in total data usage.

The research study concluded (as we expected) that by filtering out online advertisements Adblock Plus significantly reduced network data usage.

Other benefits of running Adblock Plus on large networks include:

• mitigating instances of malvertising and other security risks
• decreasing employee/student distraction

We’ve always assumed that Adblock Plus makes your network faster, and now we have some proof that it does.

Comment [6]

1. Michael · 2015-07-08 19:07 · #

   thank you so much for this fantastic App’ it has made my life so much easier – also i am not getting mad anymore every time i want to watch an 8’ minute video on utube without being forced to watch an entire Commercial. /..again thank you very much to everyone at Adblock who made this fantastic little App’ possible,

2. Max · 2015-07-14 00:24 · #

   I don’t get how to sign up for the ad block it’s not working for me

   Reply from Ben Williams:

   Do you mean download it for yourself? In that case just go to the home page (adblockplus.org) and hit the big green button.

   … or do you mean Adblock Plus for Administrators (of large IT networks)? If that’s what you’re looking for send an email here: deployment-support@adblockplus.org; and see the following URL for more info: https://adblockplus.org/en/deployments

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4. John · 2015-07-20 05:16 · #

   What filters were used?

   Reply from Ben Williams:

   EasyList and Acceptable Ads, ie out-of-the-box ABP

5. Erin Bourke · 2015-07-24 09:27 · #

   I can’t seem to get into advanced options to enable adbloc. When I select modify network, it shows advanced options briefly and then it disappears, and it becomes impossible to choose. What should I do?

   Reply from Ben Williams:

   Sounds like you’re trying to deploy on a large network, not use ABP individually? If so, please send an email to our LSD team: deployment-support@adblockplus.org

6. Haq Nawaz · 2015-07-25 20:05 · #

   Please stop anoying adds

   Reply from Ben Williams:

   Doing our best!

Commenting is closed for this article.