The Real Cost of Mobile Ads

New submitter cvdwl writes: A New York Times (mildly paywalled) article and associated analysis discuss the consumer cost of mobile ads, assuming a US$0.01/MB data plan. The article provides one of the only estimates I've seen of the the real cost in time and money (and time is money) of mobile advertising. Ethics of ad-blockers aside, this highlights the hidden costs of data-heavy (often lazy and poorly developed) web-design. In a nutshell, the worst sites took 10-30s load 10-20MB, costing $0.15-0.40, over 4G due to a blizzard of video, heavy images, and occasionally just massive scripts. The best sites had high content to ad ratios, typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising.

Comments

you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS!

[Pseudonymous Powers]

I sometimes see those "if you like this site, please turn off your ad blocker" banners on sites that I do actually like.

So, a few times, I have turned off the ad blocker, just to see what would happen. The results are always either, one, incredibly intrusive and distracting autoplaying videos playing at random moments, or two, the site just stops working completely because, even on a medium-performance laptop with a business-class data connection, the web browser just can't handle the gigabytes and gigabytes of advertisements that the site is trying to push over the wire.

Maybe if there was a browser that let you opt out of loading, then autoplaying, enormous video files without plugins, I would consider it. But until then, the blocker stays on, thanks.

Re:you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS!

[mccalli]

My favourite is a somewhat optimistic one that appears on my iPad when it looks at hereisthecity.com. I always read in landscap - what happens is the site appears for a second or so, then an enormous black square appears blotting out all the content and the text "Please rotate your device" inside it.

Err...no. No I am not going to rotate my device purely in order to see some advert that;s meant to be inside this giant black square that I don't want to see in the first place. I've had that happen quite a lot on the site, and I've still got no idea what's meant to appear because I just close the site when it happens. Meh.

Not just a problem for mobile browsers

[Anonymous Coward]

This underscores one of my main reasons for running some ad blockers. Even in the desktop world, not everyone has a quad-core 3GHz i7 machine with 16GB of RAM. I have an older Mac limited to 2GB (and a slower processor). Some sites I visit lock up my machine for many minutes while they try to render 23 flash video ads, 400 pages of java, and a GB of browser chrome. I've just learned to not visit some of those sites any more since they ruin my browsing experience.

And no, I do not feel the need to spend $1500 on a new machine just so advertisers can serve me up more ads faster.

Learn to proofread.

[cvdwl]

typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising

I'm pretty sure that should be <500kB of advertising.

Yep... mea culpa. As soon as I saw it go up, I cringed and went wildly searching for the edit function. And the sentence before that should read: ".. took 10-30s to load 10-20MB ...". Submit in haste, repent at leisure.

Re:In other words ...

[0123456]

Ad blocking is about security, it's about privacy, and it's about making the best use of a metered resource.

No, it's not.
Script blocking is about all those things, ad blocking is simply about not wanting to see ads, but still wanting to use a site or an app.

Ads serve malware, track you, and waste your bandwidth. Which part of that are you claiming isn't true?

Re:In other words ...

[gstoddart]

Same ones who have no qualms stealing movies and music. Sorry to break this to you...grownups pay for stuff.

Well, if a site wants a revenue stream, they have two choices: a subscription, or ads. Some sites choose both.

That you want to pay for your site is not my problem. I understand you have costs, but if you think your need for ad revenue means I'm implicitly consenting to the "privacy" policy of the dozen or so sites embedded in your site collecting my data ... too fucking bad.

Sorry, but I don't consent to be tracked and analyzed by the dozens of asshat analytics companies on the internet. If your business model relies on that, that's your problem.

So you can either actively prevent me from reaching your site -- and that's your choice and why I have simply blocked the New York Times for example. Or you can accept that there will be a fraction of people who block your shit. Facebook, for instance, is completely blocked in my browser. It is none of their damned business where I go and what I do. So is Twitter. And DoubleClick. And Scorecard. Basically a whole slew of crap I never consented to being tracked by is totally blocked ... no images, no cookies, no script ... nothing at all.

The real world analogy to this would be as you walk into a store some asshole representative from an ad agency runs up and slaps an RFID tag on you so they know what other stores you go to. And in the real world I'd be forced to beat that person senseless.

So, boo fucking hoo, as long as ads and analytics depends on me being spied on across a bunch of sites, then I will treat them as hostile entities.

Because that's exactly what they are. They're parasites who believe they're entitled to my information.

Want to serve an ad from your own host which is generic and doesn't call out to external entities? I probably won't block it. But I'm sure as hell not allowing these tracking sites access to anything.