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.

Comments

Re:Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock

[rmdingler]

I came here to say this, and to add how obvious the solution must be for would be advertisers:

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.

Re:A simple proposition.

[Dutch Gun]

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

Re: Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock

[hawguy]

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.