If you need another reason to hate annoying animated banner ads, a paper published on Monday shows that that the worst sites require your computer to use an additional 11 watts of power handling the animated ads. So these banner ads contribute to global warming!
The study was not exactly rigorous, but the animated banner ads, based on technologies like Flash, clearly use an additional amount of power.
The study went on to try popular ad-blocking technologies like Adblock Plus and NoScript, and found that these reduced the power consumption to the same level as if the ads didn't exist. Scare-mongering advertisers claim ad-blocking will will cause the Internet to fail. But now you can reply that you're using ad-blocking to save the planet.
[via The Register]