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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?"
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.
Good point.
Yes, a browser should schedule the download of additional content, and it should give priority to same domain, next to different subdomains of same domain (e.g. "images.mysite.com") and last to other domains.
Of course, if that were the standard, the ad people would come up with something to defeat it. See, these are the people who are actively working on giving you content that you don't want, and they consider it important to bypass all your filters, to make sure you've seen their ads. Because you don't count, only our pageview or clickthrough does.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Indeed. I have a lighttpd instance running on my computer just for this reason. It serves up a single page containing only the following text:
404 - ad fail
And if anyone is wondering why I'm running an HTTP server just for this it's because serving the 404 kills the request much quicker than letting the browser timeout the connection. Lighttpd is very light on resources but also allows me to have access logs, which allows me to get some interesting data. For instance, I split the logs up by month and here are some of the sizes:
I've also written a perl script to import the logs into an SQLite database. Which allows things like:
All hosts blocked with over 1,000 hits (from the aforementioned April to June logs)