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?"

Comments

Re:No surprise

[iamapizza]

The ads are usually javascript scripts which in turn are requesting external pages by document.write()ing out iframes to the content page which in turn may have their own resources (js/css/jpg/gif/etc) to request. A lot of browsers don't like showing you the entire page until the javascript bits have been requested, hence the delay.

Of course the technical details are er... more detailed, but you get the idea.