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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.
Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock. Oh, wait, I didn't feel guilty before I learned this.
Rotten Bastards.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
My eyeballs are mine to keep
Not for you to make a dime a peep
Do we fight them, or are we sheep?
Burma Shave
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I clicked on a AD for a video on the YouTube homepage and you know what? It made me watch an AD before I could watch the AD I clicked on.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I actually thought that was his sig.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?
E.g. Embed the ad in a sized Iframe.
Don't you feel stupid wearing that tinfoil hat?
Not if you cock it at a jaunty angle.
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.
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.
Microtransactions were once suggested as a solution to this problem, but credit card transaction fees destroy the profitability unless these are collected regularly and then charged in bulk. Some startup could sell NetBux, so a $0.05 microtransaction could be transferred free deducting from a $5 balance; credit card companies would only get a cut for that single $5 purchase. However, unless every browser manufacturer integrates NetBux support, it's dead in the water. Since everyone and their grandma would want to own the NetBux standard and take a cut of that, the most viable option is Bitcoin: it's free, noone owns it, it already exists, and has widely supported infrastructure.
Your browser would have a new UI element that lets you type in a redemption code for a Bitcoin card you buy at a store, or you can import from a wallet. It'd also have as part of the UI what your balance is. If you go to the landing page of say CNN.com it'd advertise prominently what the cost per story is. Click on a story, and before it pops up, the web browser asks if you accept the charge and tells you what the cost is. If you accept, then that amount is deducted, with an option to 'remember for this site.' This site would then be whitelisted, but only at the agreed-upon fee. The whitelist would need to only work for certain subdomains, or something, so that an official page could charge you, but not user content (comments, complementary webpages ala Angelfire, email, etc.) Perhaps it'd involve signed certificates; if you want to charge to access a page, there's no excuse for it not to be encrypted.
It'd be anonymous enough for most people, and porn sites would love it: "click this video, only 3cents; access this photo gallery for 2cents".
It'd also make it trivial to finally implement the 'paid prioritized email' idea, so that non-spam would make it through filters by being accompanied by a 'gift' of a couple cents.
One downside is that it'd be an obvious target for malware; have your botnet send their $5 to your anonymous account. Tying a credit card to the browser to auto-refill the balance would be even worse. There'd also be young kids who click 'accept' on the 'deduct $1.00?' prompts not realizing it's real money, and parents who are sick of refilling their kids' browsers, wondering where that money is going.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Whenever a site takes an overly long time to load or is add loaded I go to their competotors web site which seems to be quicker loading. Also many ad rotator providers have become 0-day security risk so I just block them by default.
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
Don't you feel stupid wearing that tinfoil hat?
Not if you cock it at a jaunty angle.
Then you leave the critical 'side' of your head vulnerable to a well-aimed 'jaunty' attack while your defences are down.
Ensure your tinfoil covers down to neck level at *all* times.
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
APK
Fuck off APK. Once was enough of your damaged posts, beyond that it's just shilling for shit.
Why don't you go home and spend some quality time with Sex Conker, be the cow in his life.
If we wanted a brain dead multi-megabyte host file we'd make it ourselves - certainly wouldn't download one of yours everyday.
Now if only I had a filter for APK without having to browse at above 0 and miss some of the good posts....
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.
First off, let me clarify: I can actually see the value of good advertising, and there are adverts that I have enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones that manage to be humorous. A good example in UK is the a chain of opticians called Specsavers; they are not actually particularly good, in my view, but the adverts are fabulous. Another one is for a roadside assistance provider (RAC? Blue Flag?) where a guy fills up with the wrong fuel and has a nightmare fantasy about his girlfriend writing a song called 'Piggy Eyes'. Heady stuff.
But the industry should pull their socks up and police their own ranks, because 90% or more is utter, vile crap, that only serves to drive people away from the products they advertise. Or failing that, governments should do it for them, harshly and draconically. It isn't just about protecting consumers, it is about protecting legitimate businesses and their legitimate advertising as well.
Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.
Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.
This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.
I don't read AC A human right
Nah, carts and boxes are not placed intentionally - at least not typically. A store manager may do so but that is because they only understand the most basics of pedestrian traffic habits. My business modeled, and consulted on, vehicular traffic but we expanded to human traffic analytics, modeling, optimization, patterning, and consulted as well as designed throughput metrics. You may well have been in a product of our design or driven on a road that we helped optimize. (Do not blame us, they fail to listen much of the time and half-assed implementation is sometimes worse than no change at all,)
I feel a novella coming on. You have been warned. Skip or read it, it is up to you. I think you may be surprised.
Anyhow, clutter is never good. Specifically look at end caps and in-aisle displays. Those are actually supposed to be in rather specific places. They create bottlenecks at places with colorful items in large boxes or in places where things smell nice. They are usually expensive items or, more accurately, items with a good ROI.
The reason things are grouped together is because it avoids confusion. Trust me - they'd love to scatter stuff randomly around the store and would doubly love so if they were the only game in town. However, base ingredients will be as far away from each other (while still intuitive - usually) as possible while still being as far away from the stuff that you will use it for. Eggs are, for instance, nowhere near the cake mixes.
You will, almost invariably, travel to your right. To your right is, almost invariably, something that you can smell and see. We built, and staffed, a grocery store in the real world and in a laboratory environment. (The lab was able to be configured for a variety of simulations.) You *will* go right given the choice. You will smell stuff and look at large pretty things. It will make you hungry and in the mood to buy more. (Now that you know this, or thought you did before, you are not immune - you will do it.) Very little sells at the bakery and it operates almost at a loss - and in some instances at a loss. However, next on the list, is often a deli. The deli is lovely and there is a metric fuckton (professional vernacular) of profit there.
Then you have stuff in your way - usually after another attempt to assail you with colors and scents known as the produce section. This slows you down for the fish, prepackaged or custom meat cuts, and a frozen goods section just ahead. Wait - no - you can't go there... You have to figure out how to go to the aisle now. Or, best case, you walk down and walk back. There you view the "end caps" which are things on sale. Great, you saved money, now you can spend more in the next aisle.
No, you say! I decry such manipulation and I am immune! I only buy stuff on my list! Ever! Great - that is cool because you spend less time. While you spend less time you do two important things. You buy nothing on sale or no loss leaders. You use an alternative route which serves to slow people down. You are in and out quicker but have done more for us than we could have done on our own - we appreciate that and we plan accordingly. We count on your behavior. We price the markup at such that you pay more. Thank me later.
The milk, eggs, and dairy? Yeah - we all need that stuff. So we are going to put that in the back left. We are going to make it tough to go left to get to the items. If you do then you're going to be faced with traffic and end caps directly facing you. We do put the pharmacy close, usually, because we do not want sick people in the store. Frozen and chilled goods? Yeah - let's put those in the middle. Why? People often go there last. We want you to go back and see all those end caps (things on sale that are not really on sale or are a loss leader).
Printed an ad in the newspaper with coupons? Yup... It just so happens that those items are around other big colorful or smelly items - and often have been moved and that just happens to coincide with when the sale began. Thought you knew wher
"So long and thanks for all the fish."