A new survey out of the US appears to confirm previous similar surveys – that people use adblocking software not to avoid the ads but to avoid the invisible tracking that goes on behind them.

The survey by US based firm Secret Media – who specialise in helping publishers manage the rise of adblocking software – found that an ad takes up, on average, nine per cent of the space on a web page but 54 per cent of the load time.

The reason the ad takes up so much data, the survey deduced, is because of the tracking and cookies that come with most digital ads these days.

Again, the survey reinforces similar surveys in the past that consumers use adblocking primarily to alleviate the slow load times ads can cause to websites. And are actually OK with viewing the ads.

“We believe that the misuse and lack of control over advertising technologies is a major, if not the major, contributing factor to the increasing use and adoption of Ad blocking solutions,” the Secret Media report said. “It is our hypothesis that advertising technologies are negatively impacting publisher websites.”

The survey examined the websites of 25 top US media companies. The load time, bandwidth and URL requests of pages with ad blockers switched on were compared with the results of the same pages with ad blockers switched off.