Brian X. Chen, writing for the New York Times:

In the first test, we recorded the data sizes of the 50 most popular news websites with and without ad blockers enabled. We used those figures to calculate approximate page load times on a 4G mobile network.

In the second test, which was designed to measure battery life, we compiled a custom iPhone app to cycle through dozens of popular websites in an endless loop. We then timed how long it took the battery to completely drain from our phone with and without ads.

Some of the results:

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.

In another example, the home page of The Los Angeles Times measured 5.7 megabytes with ads. After shedding ads, that dropped to 1.6 megabytes with Crystal and 1.9 megabytes with Purify and 1Blocker. On a 4G network, the page took 11 seconds to load with ads and four seconds to load without ads.

Loading times for The New York Times were also faster with ad blocking software. The home page of NYTimes.com measured 3.7 megabytes when loaded with ads and took seven seconds to load; Purify shaved the size down to 2.1 megabytes and cut the loading time to four seconds.

And Chen’s ultimate conclusion:

As for me, the test results spurred me to keep Purify enabled on my iPhone. While I’m browsing, the app lets me easily denote a website whose ads I want to allow to be shown, an action known as “whitelisting.”

That means the websites I enjoy visiting that have slimmer ads — like TheGuardian.com, and, ahem, NYTimes.com — will be whitelisted. But sites saddled with ads that belong in digital fat camp will remain blocked for the sake of my data plan.