2.6 KiB
SOURCES
This is a minimial blocklist based on the W3Tech annual surveys on most used webtechnology. In stead of crawling the web analyzing Alexa's TOP 500.000 websites, I looked at the web industry itself, to block the bulk of the mainstream advertising services with the obvious benefit of low maintenance effort (for me) and low performance impact (for the adblocker you are using).
WHY USE A MINIMAL BLOCKLIST?
In advertising the number one (Google) has a marketshare of around 40 percent, Facebook the number two hits the 20 percent mark while the number three Comscore just has a little over 2.5% marketshare. For comparison Amazon with its huge webstore generates about the same advertising traffic on its own website.
Number 250 on this list only has a marginal market share of 0.1 % 1n the Alexa top 10000. Imagine how effective URL number 50.000 will be of your blocklist. Fair chance it will never be triggered. Some adblockers have an option to exclude URL's with low usage (like AdGuard 'use optimized filters' option) or periodically filter out dead URL's (Opera's and Brave's build-in adblockers).
Opera performed an analysis on the effectiveness of Easylist and reported in a blog that 20 percent of the listed URL were dead and another 60% had a 'hit rate' of less than 1% of all the traffic of the Opera browser users (having agreed to provide telemetry data). Scientifics studies showe that large blocklist are (a little) more effective on 'long tail' websites (not in Alexa top 500.000), but a less effective on Alexa top top 500000 (websites with more than 2000+ visitors per day), because common blocklist trigger adblock walls and anti-adblock measures or even help to identify you (see for instance https://browserleaks.com/proxy).
ALTERNATIVES
When you want a common use well maintained small blocklist, use Disconnect's common Ad-filter or Peter Low's blocklist (over 3000 blacklisted URL's). When you want a well maintained medium sized blocklist, use Steven Black's blocklist (more than 50.000 URL's blacklisted). When you want a large blocklist have a look at the 'ultimate' blocklist of Energized.pro (over 700K URL's blacklisted).
ERRORS & ISSUES
When you still want to use this blocklist, feel free to use it and provide feedback on errors. You can post issues, but I will only have a look at it when the issue causes a problem on an COM, INF, NET or ORG domain.