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Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike
miller60 writes "Advertising networks are being cited as the major bottlenecks in performance woes experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson. An analysis by Keynote found that many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads. The inclusion of third-party content on high-traffic pages is a growing challenge for site operators. It's not just ads, as social media widgets are also seeing wider usage on commercial sites. How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
Can't say that I noticed any of slowdown on Friday. All of the content continued to stream from my custom ad server (127.0.0.1) at exactly the same speed as usual...
Even at times of average load you can see delays as the browser goes off to find some unresponsive ad server. Google analytics and other stat-gatherers can be a problem too. It's annoying when it prevents the appearance of a page. Seems easily solvable within the browser though, set content from other domains to be on a shorter timeout. If the site fails because some off-server content isn't available, that's a badly-designed site. Ordinarily I'd just miss out on a few ads. Boo hoo!
Many news web sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers.
Luckily I don't deal with ads. But if I did, I would try to work something out where I'd have a temporary directory with the cached ads ... especially if they were some hit-the-monkey-resource-intensive-flash-ad. Then I'd have a cron job or maybe just a servlet running on a timer that queries my ad provider's site for new ads, replace the ads in the directory with their names being generic so that they can be randomly selected based on size and ... you're a whole lot nicer for the internet. Sure, now it's your traffic that's being taxed but at least you're not taking part in a massive attack on your ad server.
... but when they're hogs like the article's flash ads are, you would expect some better design or fallback.
I understand the beauty of not knowing anything about the ads and just getting whatever AdSense or AdWords or whoever serves you up your ads
My work here is dung.
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads. Or better yet, replace them with a text ad for AdBlock Plus. Hey, a guy can dream, right?
Ryan Fenton
I'll bet THAT isn't in the autopsy report.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
another great reason to use ad blockers.
I often noticed loading slowdowns because of web bugs and ads...
And once you get used to it, if you ever come back to ad filled pages,
it feels like watching a formula 1 car covered by stickers:(
RIP, Billy Mays.
Billy Mays ordering at McDonalds
.
Trolling is a art,
I would have been first to post but the bloody advertising bottlenecked me. I'm going to head over to Rotten Tomatoes, I'm sure that won't happen there.
I can see how the ads would be the bottleneck in serving a site... if not only because it's the same case for users with most sites on normal days too.
Very often I'm stuck waiting for the ads to load, before the actual site shows up on computers where I don't have the luxury of an adblocker; And even with an adblocker I sometimes see my computer still using some resources to get the ads down.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Just use the RSS or Atom feed instead of the web page.
Without those ads, there would not be the high number of news sites available for viewing breaking news stories that can drive this Jacko level of interest.
I had not noticed any issues on Friday at all so I was rather surprised by the news reports about net slowdowns. Adblock FTW!
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
That is the solution - just like more energy, not less, is what will benefit the environment and the economy. Archimedes, don't you know.
Google has always appealed to me because of it's VERY basic homepage. No extra crap unless you want it there (iGoogle). I understand that it would be hard for a website to thrive without a method of revenue, either through a store or ads, but I tend to stick with sites that keep ads to a minimum. I've even stopped going to sites because of the overbearing amounts of ads. Slashdot has a nice system too. Giving you the option to turn off ads if you contribute.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Can someone explain to me why this phenomenon occurs? Is content loaded serially, one item at a time?
Reflow is my best guess. The browser has all the data for the rest of the page, but it doesn't know what width and height to give to an ad object until it has loaded.
News sites are often too greedy to remove ads. They have to decide whether to take a lesser paycut from less ads or to get a reputation for loading slowly because of ads.
it would seem easy enough with correct site coding / browser tabs [I admit to NOT being an html / css expert] to force the ads to load last so that at least the content loads regardless of the ads being slow / non-responsive. Of course the advertisers would rather be first so they get your eyeballs before all that uber-distracting content :-\
If you can't be good, be good at it!
I've seen this as a big issue with mashups of all sorts for a while.
When google was down a few months ago many sites I visited...including this one...had issues. Turns out that google was only down for my ISP due to a routing problem, but it didn't matter. The google analytics used by the site failed to load causing some weird issues. Just think how many sites are depenedent on services from third party's like google.
This to me is more of a general browser web 2.0 issue that needs to get addressed. If the ads where inserted using some sort of ajax control the news sites could easily load their content and then stream the ads in after the main content was up.
Using the html "script" tag doesn't have a lot of controls for when it loads a script that doesn't compile right or when it takes forever to load. A timeout attribute....wrap in try/catch...ignore on compile error...and some other attributes might be useful. The same would go from image tags and all other tags that have some sort of src attribute.
If the ads are holding up the delivery of the site, load them last. It's not too hard to structure a site so that the primary content renders and gets delivered while other stuff loads next.
Ok, I get the idea that you need ads on your site. And I fully understand that those ads are probably going to be served from an outside source who you don't have control over.
That being said, WHY, WHY, did you design your layout in such a way that a slow ad could slow down the page load? Aren't their about a hundred and one ways to slip ads into a page that ensure that the actual page loads and the ad just gets there when it gets there?
... or use noscript with firefox.
Your pages will load much, much faster. Even better, since many ad networks only serve ads with javascript, you get less ads.
There are some websites that don't work with javascript, but you can whitelist them.
If the news sites aren't having any problems serving their pages could they cache the ads as well so their users get a consistent experience? Just curious.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
We have this problem at work with a lot of our client sites. The general solution (if possible) is to load ads after the document is ready.
There is no way I am going to wait for a server in god knows where to respond back via a tag.
"many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads .. How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
Slashdot also suffers from this. The solution is to feed the adverts directly to the site and then serve up dynamically created static pages.
When running on a browser without ad block, pages will take forever to load. The basic shell will come up but it will lag when feeding content from the advertiser servers. You cannot move on with your life until the ad loads and the page content will not load until the ad. Very annoying.
Also surprising is how much of the lag comes from the computer, not the bandwidth. I upgraded the home machine recently and am amazed at how quickly sites load now. I'd assumed previously that delays in loading were just waiting for data from the site but it appears that there's a lot of overhead with the bloat that is the modern browswer. I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I think adds shouldn't be delivered through a query while you're loading a page but rather cached on the content provider directly for faster delivery.
i keep slashdot bookmarked and in my RSS feed list. critical and up to the minute information on content load times and ping response times related to michael jackson content on the web is crucial for system administrators tuning and building the next dimension of web 2.0 applications and cloud services. these services, which have also in the past been dutifully covered by slashdot as well as service oriented architectures and grid computing, will continue to have a profound impact on the ways users and netizens alike gather important michael jackson death information in the times to come.
the content workaround to employ adblock is a brilliant first step to ensuring those in the meat-world are updated constantly through twitter, boingboing, facebook, and myspace via their iphone and android phone as to the ever changing and dynamic status of Michael Jacksons inanimate plastic corpse.
Good people go to bed earlier.
> How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?
Privoxy does the job for me.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
from summary:
How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs"
I don't know, kill the 3rd party adds and social networking widgets?
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
This post blocked by category advertisement. .
That explains why I didn't notice any slow downs because I use AdBlock Plus and many filters. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Try subscribing to one of the ad lists. Then they just disappear.
correct, a simple javascript body.onLoad event would suffice to load all the advertisements after a page has loaded... however, this runs into the problem that people may be running with javascript turned off, in which case they won't see their adverts, which means javascript onload wouldn't work for everyone, and that's bad for advertisers businesses.
what actually happens is the web designer/programmer adds a script reference to another site (in the form of <script> tags) that link to another website (ie, Google Ad Words) and because this script is called within the HTML, it is required to be downloaded and executed before the page can be displayed (as the external scripts may hook onLoad events, change existing tags or add new ones etc)
User Connects to www.myNewsNetwork.com
myNewsNetwork sends the page to the User
Browser parses the HTML
Browser sees that in the HEAD tag is a SCRIPT tag that wants Google AdWords.
Browser connects to Google Ad Words website
Browser downloads script file from Google Ad Words
Browser parses and executes the Google Adwords Script
Browser displays page to User
this can happen loads of times during a page load depending on the number of ads (and if the advertisement panel uses unique identifiers in the URL, the browser can't even speed up processing using caching as the URLs are different)
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
You can tune your max RTT down globally, but I don't know how to do that on a application by application basis. The default is usually 120 sec, which is in general, very generous by today's internet performance standards.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Sorry, but it's not possible with some of the ad formats being used. I actually have looked in to this and have set up some sites so the ads do load last, this unfortunately is a fair bit of work for the publisher not only initially but also going forward and most online advertising companies do not have the technical expertise - they are primarily sales focused institutions. It also means that they lose flexibility in what they can serve and as such may lose out on money to other websites that can do what a client wants.
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
For a one-time fee of 25$ USD, you will get the best Win32 ad blocking software out there. I haven't seen an ad, popup or any other type of advertisement since AdMuncher first came out. If only they made it for OSX...
Looks promising; found this in a link from TFA:
Their example/demo worked in Chrome 2.x, and FF3.5 for me:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2007/06/widget-deployment-with-wedje
body massage!
only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads.
Well, duh. I've been complaining about this for the past year. Too much ad code is using "document.write()", often for no really good reason. Browsers can load content from multiple sites in parallel, and not wait for ad content, unless Javascript is used to prevent that. All too often, Javascript is used in just that way. (As on, well, Slashdot. Earth to Slashdot: your Javascript is embarrassingly slow. Get someone with a clue.)
One of the more painful things I have to do for AdRater is to recognize dynamically loaded ad content. Google ads are loaded using at least five completely different code styles. So I actually have to look at other people's ad-serving code in some detail. It's not fun. Fortunately, one generic mechanism handles most of the cases; I don't have to track their code changes in detail.
Most of this doesn't seem to be intended to get around ad-blocking software, and isn't successful at that. It's usually either tracking-related, concerned with displaying the ad in a different CSS context than that of the surrounding content, or just the result of ineptly cutting and pasting JavaScript from multiple sources.
first of all let me pretext all this with the fact I have been working in online advertising for about 5 years for a caouple of major publishers and now an agency side adserving company. The industry as a whole has a glut of technical knowledge and is mostly sales driven. Calls to adservers usually use a call to an external javascript file which is dynamically generated by the adserver. When this call is made it passes along some variables to let the adserver know how that position is targeted. At this time some tracking also happens, so the system will count an impression against a certain ad. For this reason caching can't be done - the system has to record and decide which ad to return on the fly to make sure delivery is correct and possibly even do some optimizations around which ad to show. Think of it as a giant decision engine which also collects data and uses that to decide what to serve next. There is another way to call in an ad, and that is to use Iframes, unfortunately these will point at a different domain so it isn't possible to resize or do anything outside the box, unless the ad being served is a rich media provider who are allowed to have another little html page on the site's domain they can call up and then use to write back to the main page. Because of all the different types of javascript that can be served back depending on the company providing the ad, the ad has to be put in place if using javascript as it will often look at where in the DOM the script is called. There are too many providers doing different things, and the only way to make things work is to call it straight in.
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
... many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads... How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
Ads are not content (at least not for most viewers) - they are an annoyance. How to balance it? Get rid of the ads.
That is all.
"Looks promising; found this in a link from TFA:"
..
Looks like a solution
Web sites should display the CONTENT first, THEN load the ads. People can read the articles while all that other stuff gets it's act together. If the ad servers are too slow, then the reader will have moved on before the ads finish loading, thus freeing up resources on the ad server.
I disagree. With Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, or likely even Flash, we can make changes to the DOM after the page has loaded. Loading adds after the page render completes is not the issue. Lazy web designers and poorly designed CMS coupled with the financial model tied to ad revenue is the issue.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Quote: How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs? Please define "content". I don't think ads is "content".
Since when is an advertisement considered content ( to us regular folk, not the media giants that care more about the ad then the story, and often the story IS an ad )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Last week we had 3 celebrity deaths in rapid succession, but thanks to Billy Mays, he throws in a 4th one for ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!
without any javascript or whatsoever. just some plain formatted html coming from the 3rd party. thats the deal.
Read radical news here
Almost any time I visit a website and the website is slow to load, I can be sure to look in the status bar of my browser and see that it's trying to get data from one of the advertising websites. Ad networks are almost ALWAYS the bottleneck. Sure, once in a while it's a massive site or poorly designed... but mostly, it's just stupid ads taking the time.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
..is when you go to a site, and visually, everything appears to be fine. Everything looks loaded up wonderfully, and you can use it as you please. However, firefox on its tab still perpetually says "Loading.....". I know it's ad-related. I just hit Stop and go along my way. Myspace is one of the worst offenders. guess they need more bandwidth to http://ads-featuring-gangsta-rappers.myspace.com./
At my previous employer I devised a pretty simple hack for this. A 3rd party was slowing down our page loads so I moved their content to the bottom of the page. Where the original banners were placed I put a few empty placeholder DIVs. The content was being loaded by a SCRIPT tag so after each script tag I copied the innerHTML up into the placeholder DIV. Simple as that and it worked like a charm. The ads would show up whenever the 3rd party got them back to us and our page loaded nice and quickly.
When writing your HTML, just put your ads in iframes. Each iframe loads an ad, and your site always loads fast regardsless of lazy adservers. On top you get the ads seperated from your content from a domaine or DOM point of view.
There is an easy solution to this problem. Take advertising back into your own hands. Don't sign up for some stupid ad network to shovel punch the monkey ads all your site. Forming a relationship with companies your viewers are actually interested in will deliver better results for the advertisers and for your visitors. Don't let them cover your page in huge javascript overlays and other nonsense, doing so shows they don't respect your content or your visitors. Yes, it takes more work, but the end result is better and more profitable.
Being a programmer, I have often dealt with these pesky little ads...the best thing they could ever do, is have a separate tag, that allows to set a timeout length of time for the ads to load, else they just bounce back not available. This would shorten the loading time of many windows, and could be a usable configuration flag set by the user of a browser.
The answer is for Michael Jackson not to die again.
you had me at #!
Add an attribute to all manner of embedded objects giving the browser a hint as to the nature or priority of the content. This serves two purposes:
1) The user can instruct the browser to render the page without waiting on "low priority" content such as ads or images
2) The user can instruct the browser not to retrieve certain types of content
3) During expected high traffic periods the site could dynamically adjust the content type hints to further improve the user experience
Hmm. Maybe I should patent this.
The problem here is with pages designed to not load until the ads are shown. Optimizing the page to load each piece as it is available would greatly reduce any hangups - the problem is likely that the ad companies desire this broken methodology so you read the ads while the content loads.
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads.
Except you want to get paid for banners especially when you got the most visitors.
Control of the ad server gives economic control over the sites themselves. "Sorry 'bout that."
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The Thriller Zombie Attack Strikes Yet Again in it's myriad of ways infecting the population with an insatiable desire to consume Michael Jackson content. Some think that this phenomenon is because no one truly had a happy childhood and others speculate it's because most people just haven't become adults yet. Either way or yet another way it doesn't matter... this could be the last time the wave of The Thriller Zombie Attacks occur and for that many of us will be grateful. Although we need to be prepared for yet another wave as soon as the test results from The Thriller Zombie corpse inspection(s) have been released. And woe be to the world if foul play occurred. Well some do consider that "foul play" did occur and were paid off handsomely (sorry for the choice of that word). In any event is this the last time we'll see The Thriller Zombie Attack or will it strike again? Enquirering minds want to know more? Well then Just Eat It!. Thank you Al.
You can start by killing off flash ads. They are a pox on the face of the internet. Seriously.
Ads should never take up more bandwidth, screen real-estate or other resources than a site's actual content.
Original A/C here... I'm now feeling really bad about posting this stupid joke. It's not even my joke, I stole it from another online forum where I read it earlier today. I'm sorry for being so crude and trying to get a laugh at the expense of someone else's tragedy. Billy's family and friends need all our prayers for condolences in their time of loss.
I am a heel. Even the captcha I have to type in to post this is the word "cruddy". Very fitting.
Farrah's initials are FF, or maybe FO, since I think she got married the day before. Why's everyone writing MJ?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
When I used to work for a company that serves up millions of page views a day, we had to build our own servers to serve as proxy to the Ad traffics. That way, we only served up contents that are fully available on our server, and not subjecting our clients to the delays caused by the ads.
The fact that all the sites that are not pay sites are that way because of advertising.
Maybe this utter bullshit lets you sleep while annoying everyone on the internet, but I'm here to tell you your claim is not true. This must be what marketing types tell themselves, but--big surprise--marketing types LIE.
My web site has been up since 1997. It is not a pay site. It has no ads. Well, no paying ads--I do link to some sites to help them and I have a fake ad as well.
Hope I didn't accidentally destroy the internet by NOT collecting money. Fuckers....
Ads have always been a bottleneck. I first started using an ad blocker years ago because of this. Slashdot used to be one of the worst offenders; none of the content would display until after the ads had loaded. Sometimes the ad hosts would stop responding and you'd be left with a mostly blank page.
I think that the major companies will have to figure out how to cache a certain number of ads on their own servers and rotate them through. Having a page be slow loading because an ad is slow, or worse, having a page not come up at all because the ad site is down, is absolutely unacceptable when your livelihood depends on it. The solution will probably be something like what radio does now -- the studio has a copy of the ad which they insert at the proper moment.
Another thing driving this is that the more this happens, the more people will turn to ad blockers, which also deny companies revenue. It's a problem that needs to be solved quickly if sites are going to continue to rely on ad revenue.
Somewhat related, have anyone else had problems with extreme captcha slowness lately? It seems like every login page I've hit recently has an unacceptably long pause before the challenge arrives.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Why does somebody not make server side ads? Putting ads on the clientside with JS makes them easy to block and the webmaster has no control. On the server side I can request an ad, if ad takes more than 0.25 seconds, just display the damn page without ads for now.
The Internet Book Database
Just make the ads the last thing that loads on the page.
Problem solved.
Well they never learn. I worked for some newspaper websites some time ago. We had our own ad servers which performed really well. But they decided not to keep them but to "outsource" them.
I did tell them that they would have performance issues with that ad company since I had noticed that they were slow on other sites even when not in peak hours. And so we did manage to get performance problems with the sites.
That was when I installed adblock for the first time, so when they called and said the sites was slow, I could see that they were performing well and document it with the tamperdata plugin.
It was ironic that we had templates for the websites that was without the ads ready for those occations where we got big news like that. Our servers could handle the traffic because I had scaled the systems properly. I also asked them if there were some performance / response time / capacity included in the contract but I never got a straight answer about that.
The next step was they spent a great deal of time rearranging the templates so that the sites would render in the browser even if the ads had not been loaded.
"How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
Simple, quit rigging web sites so ads load first, and the page will not draw until the ads have loaded. You know what the banner size is, specify the size and the page should draw without the images(/flash) loaded yet. That's how they ALL worked in the early days -- well, the EARLY early days there were no ads... but after that, the ads all played nice like this.. no popups, no noise, no flash, just a GIF or JPEG in a box.
One of the ad companies, I've blocked them at work for over 6 months -- they must have one or two crapped out ad servers. At home, no sweat, never had a problem; at work, *the rest* of a page will load in a few seconds, then there's this 15 second + delay (during which of course the browser shows NOTHING) while this ad server FINALLY responds (I finally ran ethereal just to make sure.) If these pages were set up politely, instead of a blank page for 15+ seconds (or my solution where the banner ads don't load at all) I'd have a page where the ads just load late, unobtrusively.