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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."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday July 30 2015, @06:10AM
That's a winning combination. Turning off scripting kills too many useful things. But between AdBlock and Ghostery, the web is a much nicer place.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by xorsyst on Thursday July 30 2015, @11:35AM
I'll go further - you don't need adblock either. I run with just Ghostery, and I see basically no ads anyway. Most sites work fine, and it's easy to add exceptions for the wotsit widget on a particular page if I care about it.