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.
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!
Don't you feel stupid wearing that tinfoil hat?
Not if you cock it at a jaunty angle.
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.
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
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
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.