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

Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock

[onkelonkel]

Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock. Oh, wait, I didn't feel guilty before I learned this.
 
Rotten Bastards.

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:Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock

[Firethorn]

Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.

It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.

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.

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

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Dear coward

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.

What "shifty shit" do "they" do. A current citation would be informative.

Nice that you include default. The first thing I do when I install it click on the radio button that disables the default "show acceptable ads". (second sentence)

Use uBlock.[...].

Interesting. You say that. A lot. Is that out of altruism?

Which uBlock are you promoting? There are two. uBlock Origin (or uBlock) and uBlock.

I tried both uBlocks, and found they had a number of failings for my use case. I'll reassess my reasons for not using or recommending it if you show me which reasons are incorrect:-

• It didn't block as many ads, or pop ups - so it's not as fit for it's stated purpose. That's clearly stated in the documentation - they support the majority of ads in the ABP filters.
• Neither uBlock support regex filters, which I use a lot.
• The uBlocks don't support $sitekey
• ABP removes social buttons
• ABP stops most tracking
• ABP has Typo Protection (it has to be added as an extension in Firefox)

• Caveats: I use ABP in Iceweasel (Firefox) on Linux, all my boxen have >2GB of RAM. I add a lot of extra blocking to the standard filters (and some specifically for /.).

  Balance - I have no interest in support for Chrome. I'll happily trade a few extra MB of RAM usage, or a few microseconds of page load time for improvements in blocking. Not seeing ads, seeing relatively more content, customisability, exploit blocking, and decreased data transfer are high priorities for my use case.

  For people that need something simple for Chrome to block some ads, and run an OS that chews up most of their RAM, and only want to block ads - uBlock Origin is probably the best choice.

  Also use https everywhere.

  I use NoScript - which makes HTTPS Everywhere redundant while giving me extra valuable features. I'd add FlashBlock to the minimal recommended extension - if someone has Fffflash installed.

Roadside signs

[TigerPlish]

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

Youtube

[sims 2]

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.

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: Industry 2nd opinion

[Bovius]

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.