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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.
typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising
I'm pretty sure that should be <500kB of advertising.
The best sites had high content to ad ratios, typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising.
I guess somebody doesn't know than > means greater than, and would make the site worse, not better.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
We pay to be spied on via analytics, and potentially have malware delivered through badly written ad platforms, and as a result we effectively subsidize the profits of ad companies.
At least, I assume it is, NYT is paywalled and I've blocked them in my browser entirely.
Tell you what, let the ad companies pay for all that cellular data and see what they do. Because I assume millions and millions of dollars are used daily to deliver their "product".
Ad blocking is about security, it's about privacy, and it's about making the best use of a metered resource.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Until the advent of adblockers for mobile devices, browsing the Web on a mobile device was not fun.
I've been considering a proxy-like service that allows a user to proxy through a server that strips out all the bad stuff like ads, beacons, tracking junk. I'd like to set this up and try it with my family and friends to test the viability.
I block them all. The biggest advantage for an android phone over all others is that it's easy to blot out all ad's from all networks across all apps.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
If other sites adopted the /. style of ads, we'd probably not be complaining that much.
But there's something infuriating when I load up my browser, load up a news page and get the top banner, then nothing as it attempts to load every ad on the face of the net into the page. No, that's not the part that pisses me off, it's the fact that I can click "stop" to stop the page from loading and, low and behold, all of the content that couldn't load is now there, without the ads.
Loading your BS infected ads before your content shows me exactly what the deal is.
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.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.
What about just blocking ads while using a metered service such as data? If it's on Wi-Fi, let them through. Well, as a compromise. Okay, mod me down now.
I sometimes had to browse the web on the Windows PC at work that was used for VPN to customer sites. Some web sites would take thirty seconds or more to load until I installed an ad blocker; then they were almost instant. Most of that time, the status bar was telling me it was 'looking up' some stupid ad site.
So, no, it's not just the data usage, malware and annoyance factor that make ads bad. They're a cancer on the Internet.
Capitalism at its finest. Until there's a market-based motivation for cell phone companies to change, they won't. I don't know of more recent data, but back in 2013, the U.S. ranked 3rd most expensive, behind Canada and Japan. Unfortunately, I don't think that analysis included data and it isn't very current. Certainly, the U.S. could be far and above the worst right now.
Because the metered service isn't the only cost? It may be the easiest to measure, but it's by no means the only cost.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
adblock.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Years ago we had laws that came about from unethical ad companies that would robo dial people ten or more times a day and use up all their fax paper pushing dubious products. Basically the law stated that advertising was illegal if the receiver had to pay anything to receive it or it prevented genuine messages from getting through (by using up all the fax paper, or answering machine tape, etc.). This was years before the mobile industry really took off.
Unfortunately in recent times those unethical ad companies bribed enough corrupt politicians to take those laws off the books or otherwise make them ineffective, I'm not sure which. These laws need to return.
While trying to click on this post I accidentally hovered over a banner ad that suddenly went full screen. The new Taboola ads are the worst. They are shamefully inappropriate in an almost comical way.
So, your solution is to regulate the shit out of every last detail, and have government approve of everything we do, and we can't do it without government approval.
How about we vote with our wallets? If you want to see the latest click bait "Wardrobe malfunction" article, by all means click it. You get what you deserve.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Oops. Didn't realize I wasn't logged in. 'Works for me' is from me.
At a minimum allowing every site to run arbitrary code is moronic. Which means I need to know if I care enough about your content and have any trust in you before I allow you to run scripts.
How should a site go about gaining the user's trust? I imagine that one way to gain the user's trust is to offer a subset of functionality that works without any client-side script. But this is impractical for a lot of sites, and UX could suffer severely. For example, in a web application for drawing a picture, there is a workaround for not being able to use JS+SVG or JS+Canvas, but it's painful. The site could use server-side web forms, which allow interaction only through clicking, not dragging, and re-send the entire picture after every click. That not only wastes more bandwidth than wise use of scripts but also makes it difficult to use many paint tools.
But I'll just click the back button and move on.
Have fun using your search engine all day but not finding anything because you hit the back button on every result.
Who the fuck said that? I didn't suggest we regulate the shit out of anything.
Ethics is not at all concerned with your perceived entitlement to peoples' eyes and internet connections.
Which is why you unblock what actually makes the site function while cutting out all the pointless junk it tries to load alongside it
Until "what makes the site function" crashes because it raises an exception when querying "the pointless junk". This has happened with an HTML5 Pac-Man game that someone recommended to me in a comment to a story about the demise of Flash. Normally I use the tracking protection that Firefox exposes through about:config, and I had to click the back button because the error console showed a ReferenceError: _gaq is not defined when the site failed to properly catch the failure to load Google Analytics. This caused me to feel embarrassed to myself when I couldn't offer my opinion on it.
After I buy a product, I see ads for it. That's a complete waste of time and bandwidth.
How is it "a complete waste of time and bandwidth" to attempt to convince you to buy more for your friends and family, or to buy replacements for a consumable item such as food or printer paper?
What about just blocking ads while using a metered service such as data?
Because some people have metered service at home. In rural areas and parts of Seattle, the only ISPs faster than the 128 kbps of ISDN are cellular and satellite, which are metered.
Whether the ad exists or not, you pay the same phone+internet monthly bill unless you're a heavy user who uses up every last byte of monthly capacity.
A lot of people whose only available home ISPs are cellular or satellite end up being that type of user.
Make ads text-based or vector-graphics based or something else that uses less bandwidth.
Except that the demise of Flash Player, which doesn't work on recent Android and has never worked on iOS, has driven advertisers to pre-render their SWF vector graphics ads to video, which uses more bandwidth.
Is this all merely about how it recently got a little easier for iOS users?
I'm pretty sure that the recent release of iOS was the catalyst for this media attention.
Every time one goes to a web site with advertisements the ADs get loaded and start to play, even when they are not on the screen, above, below or to the side. Yet YOU are paying for the kilo, megs, gigabytes that they send you, It get ridiculous with some pages, several video ads start playing, you can't see them, but you can hear their audio all trying to drown out the others, and YOU are paying your ISP for the privilege of listening to this cacophony. Another issue, you are mildly watching some ad, you get called away for what ever, your child need to go to the store... yet you still get charged for the gigabytes the advertisement requests while your not even in the house, so no way are you being entertained. I would insist that after 5min. playing the browser put up a query if you are still interested in watching. Yeah I know one does not want to interrupted in the middle of Game of Thrones to answer queries, but the browser knows where the data is coming from and can check once and then let it play. I would mandate that the browsers are intelligent enough to know if and when the ads are visable and totally block them if they are not visable, would save a lot of download data.
Because the ads are becoming so intrusive and now they consume so much bandwidth and take sooo long to load that they are interfering way too much with accessing the desired content.
Because web ads have become so intrusive that pretty much everyone has installed an ad blocker.
The advertising piggies shat in the trough, and now they're whining because we won't go back to feed them any more.
Researchers have also found that in-app mobile ads have even higher costs. The press release (here) and paper (here) showed that apps with these ads consume an average of 16% more energy – but up to 33% more; 48% more CPU time, resulting in noticeable slowdowns in the app’s response time; and uses around 79% more network data, costing an estimated 1.7 cents every time they’re used. For app developers there was also a cost in terms of increased maintenance effort, increased complaints, and lower ratings.
No, your "Capitalism at its finest" (sarcasm, I get it) was a swipe at Capitalism. On the other hand you have socialism at its finest, which you'll likely ignore. I'll take Capitalism at its finest over Socialism at its finest. Especially if the worst we can do is SPAM ourselves with click-bait advertisement sites on our cell phones.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.