It's a percent of DNS requests. It might be quite difficult to see what percentage of bytes it translate to, since HTTP requests aren't actually sent.

My pihole is showing 18.7%-23% of requests blocked :)

Pi-Hole is a DNS solution so it's just blocking DNS lookups. Mine is currently blocking 43.9% of all DNS requests.

I set it up recently. It's about as much effort as buying and setting up a new laptop with ubuntu if you get a kit. I'd imagined it as a project beforehand, but in reality it's super easy and trivial (assuming you're comfortable using linux and ssh at a noob level).

Yep same. I'm a mere web developer that mostly works on Mac. Getting Pihole setup only took me like an afternoon after having an RPi sitting around doing nothing for months. They make it really easy, just follow the instructions. Also I'm lucky enough that my router has a friendly interface where it's easy to set the router DNS to pihole.

How would you measure bytes if the requests are blocked?

Some people are good at thinking a process through to the end. Others are not and ask questions at the first unknown. It's a large part of why I'm not a teacher.

Run the same requests throught different end points. Each through pihole & unfiltered, while monitoring the traffic on both.

Doesn’t that defeat the point of pihole? Though I suppose if what you want to do is measure things it makes sense.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Just to get a sense of how much bandwidth I am saving by in fact blocking the request.

It would be nice to know how much we're wasting.