Slashdot Mirror
Advertising Companies Accused of Deliberately Slowing Page-load Times For Profit
An anonymous reader writes: An industry insider has told Business Insider of his conviction that ad-serving companies deliberately prolong the 'auctioning' process for ad spots when a web-page loads. They do this to maximize revenue by allowing automated 'late-comers' to participate beyond the 100ms limit placed on the decision-making process. The unnamed source, a principal engineer at a global news company (whose identity and credentials were confirmed by Business Insider), concluded with the comment: "My entire team of devs and testers mostly used Adblock when developing sites, just because it was so painful otherwise." Publishers use 'daisy-chaining' to solicit bids from the most profitable placement providers down to the 'B-list' placements, and the longer the process is run, the more likely that the web-page will be shown with profitable advertising in place.
Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.
It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.
I don't read AC A human right
Back when slashdot tried that, people were against paying for subscriptions to websites.
Maybe it's viable to revisit it now. Times have changed.
It would be interesting to see what perks they can make. Especially when the readership plummets as soon as the subscription goes live.
Reeses
Dear coward
Jesus Christ don't use AdBlock Pro. They do some pretty shifty shit to try and get paid to let ads around their filters on default configuration.
What "shifty shit" do "they" do. A current citation would be informative.
Nice that you include default. The first thing I do when I install it click on the radio button that disables the default "show acceptable ads". (second sentence)
Use uBlock.[...].
Interesting. You say that. A lot. Is that out of altruism?
Which uBlock are you promoting? There are two. uBlock Origin (or uBlock) and uBlock.
I tried both uBlocks, and found they had a number of failings for my use case. I'll reassess my reasons for not using or recommending it if you show me which reasons are incorrect:-
Caveats: I use ABP in Iceweasel (Firefox) on Linux, all my boxen have >2GB of RAM. I add a lot of extra blocking to the standard filters (and some specifically for /.).
Balance - I have no interest in support for Chrome. I'll happily trade a few extra MB of RAM usage, or a few microseconds of page load time for improvements in blocking. Not seeing ads, seeing relatively more content, customisability, exploit blocking, and decreased data transfer are high priorities for my use case.
For people that need something simple for Chrome to block some ads, and run an OS that chews up most of their RAM, and only want to block ads - uBlock Origin is probably the best choice.
Also use https everywhere.
I use NoScript - which makes HTTPS Everywhere redundant while giving me extra valuable features. I'd add FlashBlock to the minimal recommended extension - if someone has Fffflash installed.
I used to work for a company that, in a roundabout way, presented advertising to consumers. And, I mean...yeah, of course they waited longer than 100ms for everyone to get their bids in.
What many people don't consider is that while the primary ad presenter is getting bids, many of those buyers are doing an auction to their own list of buyers, and some of those do auctions too, etc., etc. So a lot of those buyers would take longer than the time limit we wanted to come back to us, but they were usually some of our biggest buyers. The ones that didn't actually buy many ads would get discontinued, because we didn't want to slow down load time for someone that never actually won the bid. But the big buyers, we would generally loosen the time constraints.
The wording of the summary and article make it sound like the advertisers are cackling and holding up their pinky finger, smiting the populace with longer load times for the monies. The reality is that they aren't thinking about your load times at all, most of the time. You are the product. Load times really only entered the minds of business leaders when traffic volume was dropping.
He is right though, "boxen" is idiot-speak.
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