Estimated load time on a 4G LTE network Data usage to load mobile home page Cost per page on a typical data plan to load advertising content to load editorial content

The amount of data each website uses can vary. To get these figures, we loaded each home page on an iPhone 6 at least five times over two days and repeated the test with an ad blocker enabled.

The difference was easy to spot: many websites loaded faster and felt easier to use. Data is also expensive. We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.

Without ad blocker With ad blocker Without ad blocker With ad blocker Without ad blocker With ad blocker

Of course, news websites are supported by online ads, and if enough people block the ads the sites may struggle. Ad blockers can also have technical downsides, sometimes causing websites to load erratically. In one of our tests, one website crashed repeatedly when an ad blocker was turned on.