use a URL filter to block ads

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Advertisements on the internet

Employees that use the internet for their work or personal interests are exposed to varying amounts of advertisements. Generally, "consumer websites" like chat, news, forums, webmail etc. have a large quantity of ads (also known as "banners").

Advertisements consume a lot of bandwidth

A recent study at a large university showed that MSN and Yahoo webmail were quite popular. From the top-25 of URLs that were processed by the web proxy, the #1 was an uncacheable banner by MSN, #2 was a Yahoo advertisement and a total of 11 URLs were advertisements. So 44% of the bandwidth was consumed by mostly uncacheable advertisements !

Advertisers

Advertisers use various techniques to increase sales. This includes popup windows, tracking URLs and tracking cookies. The advertisement category of URLfilterDB includes URLs to block these techniques.

Block Ads

The URL filterDB has a large list of known advertisement URLs that can be used to block advertisements. So independent from whether you block or do not block chatting on a site like MSN, the advertisements on msn.com can be blocked.

Benefits

The benefits are twofold: you save on your bandwidth and employees spend less time looking at and following advertisements.

What does 'uncacheable' means ?

A web proxy caches web pages to increase the speed of the browser and to reduce bandwidth usage. All objects (HTML pages, pictures) have a lifetime indicating when it should be removed from a cache. Uncacheable objects have a zero-lifetime and therefore cannot be cached. This implies that the objects are retrieved from the web server each time they are referred to and consume bandwidth each time they are displayed.

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