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

Is there any evidence that web ads work?

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I mean the ones served "in passing". It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would open a page to read an article or see pics and then ignore that thing and go read or watch the ad and click on it and remember any of it, let alone actually buy something.

I don't have AdBlock in one of the four browsers I run (Sandboxied Chrome -- the others are Sandboxied FF with no flash, non-Sandboxied FF with Noscript, and non-Sandboxied Chrome that I only use for 3-4 sites), and don't remember seeing anything remotely relevant or interesting, except for a couple of youtube ads, or ads for goods I already found and bought on Amazon. And I have clicked on an ad and bought something a number of times when I was searching for the item on Google, in the mindset of wanting to buy. Though I often end up going to Amazon and buying the item there.

Facebook in that sense seems the worst, no one is in a mindset to buy, they are just looking to score a bit of interesting info or pic from "friends". Imagine watching porn and seeing an ad on the side for 15% off for iphone cases. Well you most likely wouldn't even see the ad.

Anyway that's one datapoint. The 1st google search on "do web ads work" gives this ("A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?") http://www.theatlantic.com/bus.... Prob. another case where Betteridge's law holds.

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

[Firethorn]

I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.

Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.

The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.