As a web developer I closely follow the work that Steve Souders has done for evaluating performance of websites. I feel very confident that he has no ulterior motive here, other than to call questionable the serving of ANYTHING from outside your domain and your control. Ads are just a single use-case that he has chosen to identify as a weakness since they incur numerous additional page-loading costs, first and foremost of which is at least one additional HTTP request. Sure, Google/Yahoo/MS may deal with other ad loading issues better (blocking JS, slow iframe rendering, etc.), but none can eliminate that performance-degrading HTTP request.
As a footnote, if you're at all interested in web development take a moment to check out his two books, "High Performance Web Sites" and "Even Faster Websites", they're valuable resources for research into browser behavior.
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As a web developer I closely follow the work that Steve Souders has done for evaluating performance of websites. I feel very confident that he has no ulterior motive here, other than to call questionable the serving of ANYTHING from outside your domain and your control. Ads are just a single use-case that he has chosen to identify as a weakness since they incur numerous additional page-loading costs, first and foremost of which is at least one additional HTTP request. Sure, Google/Yahoo/MS may deal with other ad loading issues better (blocking JS, slow iframe rendering, etc.), but none can eliminate that performance-degrading HTTP request. As a footnote, if you're at all interested in web development take a moment to check out his two books, "High Performance Web Sites" and "Even Faster Websites", they're valuable resources for research into browser behavior.