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.
Instead of dragging my browsing speed down to tortoise level and asking me to like it while watching your adds,
try making me benefit, even subtly, from viewing your auditions to separate me from the paper in my wallet.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
How about this:
Advertisers go back to a few small unobtrusive static ads on each page. People didn't hate ads nearly as much before the ads got so obnoxious and headache inducing, Static ads load more quickly too. One reason that more and more people started using ad-blockers is that the ads got too obnoxious, headache-inducing, and too distracting from the page content that they want to see.
Unfortunately, there is now a core of folks like me who will not ever go back to not using ad-blockers. The ads have gotten to the point where they are self-defeating. The more obnoxious and intrusive the ads get, the more people use ad-blockers.
You can put ads on a site without being a jerk about it. Make them small, non-animated, silent, and keep them out of the way of the content. Only a small minority of people tend to object to advertisements like that. It's when you start actively shoving them in people's faces, animating them, making them play video or sound, interspersing them misleadingly throughout the content, creating pop ups or pop-unders, and all that other sort of nonsense... that's when people get irritated enough to install ad-blockers.
This isn't a binary choice. Advertisement works just fine as long as it's kept to a reasonable level of non-annoyance. But time after time after time, we see that they just can't resist pushing things a bit too far and in turn pushing people to the point of taking action
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
Use uBlock. Also use https everywhere. Fuck downgrade attacks.
You mean shifty shit like say right on their home page:
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites
And they also provide a checkbox right on the main options page that controls whether to Allow some non-intrusive advertising.
Accepted by people everywhere. (Except BBC viewers, but I'll get to that.)
Technically advertising has been around since Survival of the Fittest became the order of the day. So, about the second day after the first amoeba crawled out of the oceanic ooze. But, more relevant to the issue at hand, it's been accepted ever since the inception of mass media. You can draw your line in history where ever you want. Go back as far as ancient Rome. Advertising has been there. "Come see men almost get eaten by lions! Enjoy food while you're there!"
But you probably want a more modern example. Then ever since the dawn of radio. Pumping 1000 W into the air wasn't cheap (the power of the first FM radio station.) Neither is pumping 100,000 W (modern FM station broadcast levels). Again, not to mention staffing and building maintenance, etc. But, in order to get wide adoption, they had to get people to listen. Many people felt that they shouldn't have to continue to pay after shelling out $100 (NOT inflation adjusted) for a radio. So they experimented with various revenue models, because even then, content wasn't free. So, the broadcasters entered into implied contract with the public. You get the content for "free", all you have to do is give up a little bit of attention in exchange.
And it worked fairly well for a period of time. TV came around, and all was good. Newspapers. Whatever other media used a similar model.
The BBC used a slightly different model where people had to pay a monthly license fee for every TV they owned. That license fee went straight to the BBC which paid for the content they saw. There were steep fees if you got caught watching TV without having paid your license fee. (Americans see it as a tax, which it essentially was.) And it worked for a while, until the advent of cable and satellite TV. Then the model came crumbling down.
And I don't know if you remember the early days of the internet (I do, check my slashdot ID#). Many other revenue models were tried. Ultimately, people, as always, are reluctant to pay for content. So, the advertising showed up, and we get to enjoy our content for "free". You just have to exchange some attention. And most people are happy with it.
Side note: Most people's discontent with online advertising is because Flash... blows. Well, that's changing. Within the next year, HTML5 ads are going to become the de facto standard, which will probably break AdBlock, at least for a little while. But, it ought to reduce the resource load. And for a brief shining moment, ads will become less annoying. Until they're not anymore.
As for your targeted marketing, there's a few issues at stake. Many people are creeped right the fuck out when ads get too targeted at them. Target already knows when women are pregnant, even before they do. It scares people enough to receive the mailer. Imagine having a "pregnant" cookie in your browser. It would become inescapable. (I don't want to get into a long discussion about cookies and privacy and what not. Regardless of how it's set, the advertisers would know.) So there's a careful balance that the advertisers deliberately strike between providing relevant ads and being too creepy. Again, be careful what you wish for.
As for your Fluke and circuit puller problems. Running ads targeted like that is expensive. Most of your Fluke vendors aren't exactly rolling in the dough. And they're trying to sell you on a product you're going to buy once a decade. It's not financially feasible for them to do highly targeted marketing. So, instead, you'll be stuck with Amazon's terrible retargeted ads (that are carefully designed to not freak you out too much.) since Amazon knows you'll probably buy something else to cover the costs of running the ads (plus, they get a mass discount due to the sheer volume of ads they run and they have an automated system to generate them that your Fluke vendor can't afford.)
You're not rewarding gross incompetence so much as you are dealing with uncanny valley of what consumers are comfor
Reeses
Choosing whose ads you allow to run and whose you block is the reason why I use https://noscript.net/ in preference to adblock, a bit more work but it lets me choose who ads to run and whose to block. So blocks for intrusive ads (Content first then ad), blocks for just hinting at blocking volume control (seriously how big an asshat are you), blocks for auto running videos (my choice not yours whether or not to watch the video), blocks for shitty product advertisements (be selective in whose products and services you will promote) and, blocks for supporting nasty web sites (don't support bad web sites with advertising revenue). Some of this stuff should be regulated and bad ads and ad agencies should be prosecuted.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
At least there's a checkbox to fix this brain damage but ABP has seriously undermined itself by taking payments from the very source that it exists to block.