The Real Cost of Mobile Ads

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Posted by timothy on Thursday October 1, 2015 @01:36AM from the distributed-costs-concentrated-benefits dept.

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.

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Learn your mathematical operators by The+Rizz · 2015-10-01 01:42 · Score: 4, Insightful

typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising
I'm pretty sure that should be <500kB of advertising.
1. Re:Learn your mathematical operators by AlejoHausner · 2015-10-01 03:36 · Score: 2
  
  Well, what really bothers me is that a "good" website would have 1-3MB of content. For me, a good web page is mostly text, and rarely holds more than 20K of actual content. A site with 1MB of content probably includes several colossal images, which I'm not interested in. I miss the good old days with dial-up modems. They forced web designers to rein themselves in a little bit.
2. Re:Learn your mathematical operators by Ark42 · 2015-10-01 06:04 · Score: 2
  
  So many developers reflexively include tons of jQuery and Bootstrap CSS/JS files, 99% of which aren't used on the entire site. Just because that's the only way some people know how to "code" web sites. When you add in jQueryUI and a bunch of FontAwesome fonts that aren't used either, I'm surprised some people could write a single "Hello World" page in under 20MB.
  
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3. Re:Learn your mathematical operators by idontgno · 2015-10-01 07:46 · Score: 2
  
  I'm just pleased someone knows how to put > and < symbols into a Slashdot posting.
  I was fearing that HTML entities were becoming a lost art.
  
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In other words ... by gstoddart · 2015-10-01 01:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:In other words ... by 0123456 · 2015-10-01 02:18 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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?
2. Re:In other words ... by gstoddart · 2015-10-01 02:25 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
  
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3. Re:In other words ... by Z00L00K · 2015-10-01 02:27 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Many sites today also are designed to work only if you have scripts active, which means that blocking scripts renders the site unusable.
  
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4. Re:In other words ... by gstoddart · 2015-10-01 02:42 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I consider that to be a good thing. It tells me the back button is necessary.
  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. And I use plugins to severely limit those.
  All those 3rd parties embedded in a web page? Sorry, but I trust them not at all. I don't have a trust relationship with them, I don't have a business relationship with them. They're just the parasites lurking in your website ... they're the shit on the shoes of the internet.
  So, here on Slashdot? As I type this, gstatic.com, amazonws.com, google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, ntv.io, ooyala.com, rpxnow.com, scorecardresearch.com, taboola.com, doubleclick, janrain ... absolutely NONE of these are entities I care to allow to monitor where I go. They're ruthlessly blocked pretty much everywhere.
  They don't get to set cookies, or run script, or server images, or style sheets ... because they are not entities I have a relationship with, other than the fact I want nothing at all to do with them.
  So, I'm sorry that companies partner with entities we don't trust as part of their revenue model. But it doesn't mean that I have any obligation at all to allow it.
  And, likewise, they're allowed to block me because I won't enable this shit.
  But I'll just click the back button and move on. After, of course, adding their crap and any embedded 3rd party crap to my blocked lists.
  
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No cost for me.... by Lumpy · 2015-10-01 01:47 · Score: 2

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.

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you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS! by Pseudonymous+Powers · 2015-10-01 01:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS! by mccalli · 2015-10-01 02:21 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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 by Anonymous Coward · 2015-10-01 01:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

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. by cvdwl · 2015-10-01 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Re:This is only a problem.. by Infiniti2000 · 2015-10-01 02:05 · Score: 2

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.
Re:Repeat business by AlejoHausner · 2015-10-01 03:42 · Score: 2

Showing you an ad for the same thing would make sense, if you had just bought a consumable, like batteries, or bread. But shopping on the internet, for me, is about one-time purchases.
OK, say I just bought a pair of shoes. Why would I want a second pair? Why would I buy my spouse the same shoes that fit my feet? The post you replied to does make a valid point: ad companies have little predictive power, and can't guess what you will buy next. Showing you an ad for the same thing usually shows the ignorance of the ad server's algorithm.
Re:Repeat business by Cro+Magnon · 2015-10-01 03:49 · Score: 2

When I bought my Nissan Altima, I got Nissan ads out every orifice! How many people casually buy new cars for their friends? Certainly, none of my friends do. :(
I suppose it would make sense to advertise frequently bought items like food, but they push ads for stuff that I buy once every 5 years! WTF?

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Re:How should a site gain the user's trust for JS? by TheDarkMaster · 2015-10-01 06:56 · Score: 2

He have a point, you do not. Why I should have a... paint-like "webapp"? Why the webpage, sorry, "user interface" should rely so much on scripts to show any usefull content? Hell, I found many sites that are supposed to provide static content where all they can display without scripts is a blank page, this is ridiculous.

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