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posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-perfect-advert-for-AdBlock dept.

An interesting conspiracy theory on Business Insider:

A Business Insider reader claiming to be a former ad tech executive at a really huge, well-known news publisher then sent me a fascinating email, in which he claimed that ad tech companies deliberately serve ads slowly because everyone makes more money that way.

Basically, his theory is, when a reader clicks to read a story, the page calls for bids from advertisers on the ad space available. This bidding is supposed to take place in a few milliseconds. But, my correspondent says, ad tech companies hold open the bids much, much longer, so more bids come in, driving up the price. Publishers hate this because it makes pages load really slowly, giving readers a terrible experience. But it's hard to stop because everyone — publisher included — is taking a cut of the winning bid. So publishers and ad tech companies actually have an incentive to make pages load slowly.

[...] Generally, other sources in the ad tech business tell us that this is rubbish. But a couple also admitted that there are some shady practices out there, and it is possible for this happen. "In theory he is basically correct. Publishers and the ad networks they work with have pretty effectively gamed each other. Lots of crazy s--- happens," one source told us. "It's a wild world out there and publishers are not generally very technically competent so ad networks get away with a lot."


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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:09PM

    by Marand (1081) on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:09PM (#215648) Journal

    Why exactly does page loading and display even *have* a dependency on the Ad anyway?

    Displaying an ad requires inserting code into the page, which means it will affect the load time just like any other additions would. Long-running Javascript or large images, especially early in the source, will affect how long it takes for the browser to start loading later elements. I remember something similar being a big deal around the time when broadband started becoming more popular, because people would reference large assets early in the file (like gigantic background images), creating huge delays before the actual content would load for people on slower connections.

    The page owners want those ad impressions, though, so there's less incentive to do anything about it in this case.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by DrkShadow on Thursday July 30 2015, @03:23AM

    by DrkShadow (1404) on Thursday July 30 2015, @03:23AM (#215721)

    Displaying an ad requires inserting code into the page, which means it will affect the load time just like any other additions would

    And there's the bug. Previously pages would load, show the HTML as best they could, get a style sheet and apply the style, grab the picture and load it in, moving the text around -- it loaded, and showed, piecemeal. All the Javascript blocks the whole page, sure, but it's spending very little time actually executing Javascript I suspect.

    Browsers now wait until every single piece is retrieved before they show anything at all. It really comes down to the browsers. I've always hated waiting for slow pages knowing that everything that _needs_ to be there is _already_there_ and the page is not showing _anything_ at all because one image on a defunct domain isn't loading.

    Want to have a terrible web experience? Block the Facebook address range with the firewall dropping packets, as opposed to rejecting them. The browser will wait 30 or 60 seconds to try and contact Facebook for damn near every site on the internet so that it can show that Thumbs Up icon that no one, anywhere, cares about. There are about:config settings to modify this, but nothing wholly gets it to render as it comes in, only how long it might delay before it starts doing.. something else.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:18AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:18AM (#215796) Journal
    There are two ways around this. The simple one is to just stick ads in i-frames. This is not ideal from the publishers' perspective, as it makes it easy to block them. The second is to have a trivial bit of JavaScript that does an async HTTP request for the JavaScript that handles the ads and then exec()s it. The main page can load (with a few placeholder divs for the ads) and then the ads can be inserted in the background.
    --
    sudo mod me up