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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?"
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!
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
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
The best way to deal with this sort of thing is to do regular checks as to how long hitting the address that's going to be loaded takes, in a cron job or whatever, and if it goes over a certain threshold, turn off that provider.
Sure, you'll lose a bit of ad revenue, but you won't have pissed off users who think your site is broken.
That's not a reasonable excuse for ad servers to often be slow as hell (note that I am on 768 kb/s), sometimes even right-out timing out.
Maybe some particularly popular sites should add a service-level clause for the ad providers (if they need more than 20 ms to prepare+transmit the ads, they must switch them off)?
I'M GEVIL (BETA) AND I'M HERE TO TELL YOU THAT I'M SADDENED BY THE LOSS OF BILLY MAYS!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
This guy's the limit!
They *are* loading the "primary content" first. They just differ with you as to what constitutes "primary".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think much of the issues of ads is that they do tend to ill integrated on the page and do not enhance the viewing experience. One issue is that a page may have to link with many domains, each involving multiple requests, and often the page will not render until all ads are loaded. This is fair, but, again, does mature media expect to be successful if they serve lame ads? Ads support content in a number of ways, but must not conflict with the content.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Yeah this is news? Man the main reason why I originally started blocking ads was not because I necessarily objected to them, it was because the ad servers always seem to hang up the page loads. Web 2.0 as it is called simply made this problem even worse with sites cross loading content. Web 2.0 sucks!
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
"Bigger sites ensure that ads served into their sites won't cause this kind of slowdown."
Obviously not, as some major sites were hit by this issue. What it comes down to is that the owners of these new organizations picked the advertising service they thought would give them the most money - not the ones that would ensure the highest reliability or the best user experience. This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
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.
...This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
I don't ever recall a time when the news wasn't just one more service to trade with you for advertising. When has the news ever been not about making money?
~ Ron Fitzgerald
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Yes, we all get it. Lots of Slashdotters block ads. We know. We've read it a million times on this site. Could you just shut the hell up so we can comment on the actual story? Thank you.
Comment of the year
I reject your idea that 'ads are necessary'.
you are stuck in the current way of (broken) thinking.
get out of this 'info must be free/beer' mentality.
people HAVE paid for things and will continue to do so.
people will go out of their way to AVOID ads. there's a gas station near me that has lcd monitors and they pump (heh) ads AT YOU while you are filling up the car. I never go there anymore and the few times I did, I started the pump, got RIGHT in my car and turned the stereo up to block them out. its annoying and rude and I won't stand for it.
micropayments are one method.
'but they are too expensive'.
ok, so blame THEM, then; not the users or the 'need' for ads.
solve the payment problem and I'll happily kick in a penny for each time I see your 'valuable' (cough) content.
ads are sickening and you should be ASHAMED of what you do for a living if you are an adman.
that includes ALL of google, btw. all of google is just sugar coated advertising. and the google search is so ruined by commercialism that the first 2 or 3 pages are USELESS JUNK.
tell me again how advertising is useful to anyone but business pukes, who can't earn an honest living any other way?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I think those comments can be meaningful. I avoid doing massive ad blocking, but in some cases, I've blocked ads from locations that created major slowdown in page loads.
It's an example of why ad delivery services are failing us: In modern browsers, delays for ad loading do happen from time to time, regardless of the size of your internet tubes. Bad performance makes even users that aren't ad averse want to block them, just for the performance gain, just like aggressive DRM makes users that have no problem paying for software be tempted to become pirates.
Nope. We will just block comments like yours, that complain without adding anything to the story. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Why would you need a server unless you have broken firewall rules. Your localhost should simply return TCP reset, which is much faster than having to actually service a page request.