How Much Are Ad Servers Slowing the Web?

vipermac writes "Most of the times I have a problem with a Web page loading slow or freezing temporarily, I look down at the status bar and see that it's waiting on an ad server, Google Analytics, or the like. It seems to me that on popular Web sites the bottleneck is overwhelmingly on the ad servers now and not on the servers of the site itself. In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads — or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth. Are there any studies on the delay that 3rd-party ad servers are introducing, or any new models that are being introduced to serve ads?"

use firefox and adblocker!

[fred fleenblat]

problem solved.

Like slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably would have had first post if slashdot did not serve up so many ads!!

Jokes aside, I do notice waiting for ads on slashdot quite often but it is one of the few sites that I allow more to get through.

what ads?

[ianare]

What ads are you guys talking about, I see barely any at all. *turns off ad block plus, refreshes* Holy crap! How do you even go online like this? You might as well just watch TV.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Variorum]

But if you use AdBlock your a thief! At least according to this /. article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/17/135920 6 [slashdot.org]

Re:Browser's fault?

[pedramnavid]

I work for an ad serving company and

release the hounds.

I....

[Billosaur]

haven't... noticed.... slowdown.... personally.....

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[X0563511]

Well then, feel free to call me a rampant kleptomaniac.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[skoaldipper]

Pipelining? So Ted Stevens was right!

By the way, I set pipelining.tube.maxrequests to 128. The googles, they do nothing...

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kleptomaniac? Is the the KDE p2p app?

Re:Display the page before the data's all loaded

[cerberusss]

Oh, JavaScript is multithreaded alright. I'm currently working for a fortune 500 company and I'm using a technique involving 35 pop-ups where popup 1 is a message-passing hub for all other pop-ups. Together these form the heart of our business of racks and racks full of dual Xeons pumping out ads like there's no tomorrow.

I would make it cross-browser too, if it weren't for F^(&(* AdBlock.

Re:Browser's fault?

[jollyreaper]

>> I work for an ad serving company and

> release the hounds.

Jesus, is your last name Vick? I try to be careful about what my dogs eat.

Re:0 slowdown for me

[halcyon1234]

Those could very well be porn sites that'll deliver more than just pictures of naked people to your computer.

But hey, if you enjoy virus-laden sex, then I'm sure you'll find lots of dirty, dirty places to send your header requests to...

Re:use firefox and adblocker! (mod up parent)

[Teun]

At least you get mod points. I haven't had the ability for easily five years now despite consistently having excellent karma.

Interesting, how does an AC get karma?

Re:what ads?

[tuxedobob]

I'm at the point where I just don't see images on a page. I don't block them, or use any add-on software. I just don't look at them. When I'm going to a web site, I'm looking for text, and the text is all I look at.

As soon as there's an ad that covers the text I want to look at, just close the window. I don't care who gets paid, but no one's getting any of my money, and the web site obviously wasn't that important if it was trying to cover up the content.