Why Is Serving Ads So Difficult?

Chip asks: "Many moons ago ('85) I started a sports publication and we have been moderately successful. We finally put the entire site on the Web in '95 & have learned a little as we went along. It was much more expensive than we ever imagined & frankly we lost money keeping the site up & maintained every month. One of my subscribers introduced us to banner advertising (Flycast, DC, Burst) about nine months ago and we thought it was a God-send...at first. Now I have people complaining all the time since my site doesn't load as fast, sometimes kicks people off, and so on. I don't know what to do or who to call, every ad agency and ISP we use blames someone else. Can someone refer me to an ad agency (or software that I can use to do it myself) that delivers ads that don't slow my site down or ruin the experience for my readers? I desperately need the revenue generated but can't stand the 24/7 headaches. I know this may seem juvenile to all you "experts" but I have no clue how to fix it and don't want to go back to losing money on my site. Suggestions?"

Comments

Akamai

[Matts]

Pick an ad server company that uses Akamai to distribute content. Akamai automatically sends content from a server close to the host requesting the ad. I only know about valueclick who do that - but I'm sure others will too.

ad servers

[fishbowl]

Well, consider the average ad server is getting
hit WAY more than your site, and that there is
the aggregate of the latency between the client and the adserver, plus between the client and your server. If the ad were a static, cached element that came from the same point as your site, it would not be a problem. It's probably not the
ad itself (what, a 20K jpg or a 80k animated gif?)
but the latency of the separate request and dns lookup that you forced your client to make for the privilege. Not only that, but the ad is probably
the FIRST element that the browser must resolve before it can display the rest of your site (the content!) And worse, if it's earlier in a frameset, or even worse, part of a table, then you
get things like the client not able to display your page at all.

Since the ad people think the weblogs indicate something useful, they'd probably rather shove bamboo under their fingernails than use any sort of caching or asynchronous logging.