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?"

Sheesh

[Verteiron]

"Nothing for you to see here. Move along."

Must be 'cause I'm using Firefox...

Display the page before the data's all loaded

[mh101]

Yes, I had noticed it recently too, where the page isn't displaying because of waiting for a response from an ad server.

So why don't all web browsers start displaying the data they do have, rather than waiting for the ad server to submit it's data first? If there's a delay in downloading an image on the site or a style sheet it still starts displaying and when the image/stylesheet is downloaded the page is re-rendered to reflect that. So what is it about the page design that forces web browsers to not display anything if the delay is due to an ad server?

Ads Not the Bottleneck

[moore.dustin]

While the site may not fully load (See: Done) the sites contents loading should not dependent on the ad servers. Ad servers, as described in the summary, are not part of the site server, thus making it impossible for it to be the bottleneck of the site. Everything server side will load at its usual rate, and the calls to outside servers will be handled at the usual rate of the other server. One should not have an impact on the other unless something is designed that way, in which case it is the programmers fault more than anyones.

Sure I would rather have the quickest possible times to (Done), but if the only thing holding me up is an ad or Analytics, excuse me for not caring to much.

High-CPU Flash Ads

[Kenshin]

What pisses me off are badly designed Flash ads. They use plenty of CPU power just to animate something completely useless. Last year Dell was running this ad on my local newspaper's site that took 80% of my CPU just to animate FALLING SNOWFLAKES. I complained to the website, and they took it down.

Some Flash ads barely take any CPU at all, and those are honestly fine by me, but some just hog my resources. The problem is that the people who DESIGN these ads typically have cutting-edge machines, so they don't know what it's like to run them on a shitty office machine. So, please, TEST your ads on a shitbox average computer before you force them on us!

Re:I don't mind flashing ads on a web page...

[dattaway]

After all, the publishers probably want some revenue for their work. What I do mind are websites that stop loading when there's a problem retrieving ads.

I remember an internet before AOL and things were community driven. People published for the common good and there was no shortage of information. After AOL opened the floodgates of its business model, it took a crock of a Lawyer (C&S) to teach us what spam was about. If forced advertisements weren't enough, we now have lawmakers trying to apply their business models to what should be a simple network. What have we really gained?

That is the reason I use a filter

[SmallFurryCreature]

Back in ages long gone, when firefox did not exist you had (still have perhaps) a company called doubleclick whose adservers would sometimes choke freezing the loading of the rest of the page. Why and how this happens? Do I look like someone who gives a shit?

I wanted it gone, and finally I bit the bullet and read up on squid and available plugins and setup my linux router to just filter all http traffic. Haven't looked back since.

Browsing without a blocker is like... well it just sucks. At times I am offcourse forced to browse the web without such blocking software and my god, the internet has become as bad as tv. Do they really think that if you saturate people with advertising to the point the original content becomes unusable people are really going to be more inclined to buy?

Apparently so. However not to me. This story offcourse neatly links to the story below about a site block firefox because of adblocker.

Well, who gives a shit. You went to far, now you gotta pay the price. If you don't get revenue from me, blame doubleclick and all those others who just pushed me over the edge.

At the moment I recommend bfilter to people who are fed up as well, it is browser neutral, works out of the box and does a lot more then just ad-blocking. Granted some flash bits require you to click them before they actually load but that is okay, because 99% of flash stuff I don't want to load.

So yes, ad-servers are slowing the net, by adding stuff to webpages I do not want. Can this be solved? It has been solved, not to the liking of those who depend on those ads being seen, but hey, fuck them. Do they care when I have to reload a page over and over again because some server borked?

Re:Use Adblock with my subscription...

[blueturffan]

I took one look at your website and immediately clicked away. No offense intended, but it didn't look like a site I would trust downloading anything from.

Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[schwit1]

My internet connection ain't free. If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.

Re:Browser's fault?

[Shados]

They don't want to, obviously, because you may end up going away from the page (cuz you realised it wasnt the right one) before the ad loads, unfortunately.

How about just fewer ads?

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

In my opinion we need a better model for serving ads -- or else these services need to add more servers/bandwidth.

I know that this doesn't speak specifically to the rest of your question, but IMHO, we need a better model than having ads. Just because we can have 'em doesn't mean we should all the time. It seems to me that the click-throughs, browser-tracking, etc., benefit the ad companies themselves far more than the individual content providers.

I realize I'm tilting at windmills here, but the current web ad-model has even city and local community web pages (like libraries) littering their pages with 'ads' for other parts of the same site, etc. It is really quite annoying.

/...and stay off my lawn!

Re:Browser's fault?

[ZachPruckowski]

I just want to briefly say that "screenful of code" and "Stupidly easy" are antonyms, not synonyms, in this day and age. Since many sites are run by people for whom HTML is a challenge and Javascript latin (people who install Wordpress/Movable Type/whatever), these sorts of problems go unsolved.

I'm not flaming bloggers by saying (or at least not intentionally). What I mean is that the bar for web publication has been lowered (and by and large it's a good thing, too) so that anyone with more than basic computer skills can get a blog. On the whole, this is great for the web, the Marketplace of Ideas, and society at large, but it does result in problems like this. Specifically, website creators delegate the idea of working out the details of the ads to the ad-provider, and just copy-paste in the ad code. Admittedly, if I had a blog (and I may get one soon), I'd probably start out doing the same thing until I felt more comfortable with the HTML/CSS/JS required.

Re:ignorance, selfishness and jerkiness

[White Flame]

so that way websites will be forced to go on pay to see/subscription models. what a fantastic way to go. from open, free internet to newspaper stand format.

"open, free internet" is what we had before the ads, tracking mechanisms, malicious exploits coming through said ads, and other privacy invasions existed.

"onlythievesblockthem"

[Leperous]

Re. the logic that it's "stealing" to block ads: "1% of people seeing our adverts will buy something from it" does not mean that "1% of adverts seen by any given user result in a sale." Simply put, some people will not ever buy stuff from advertising, ever, and if anything, it's stealing from them. I see no problem in blocking ads if they're paying the host on a per-click basis, rather than per-view.

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[dballanc]

"My internet connection ain't free. If the folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege."

It's funny that both the user and the website owner share the same argument. As usual in life, it's the few who make it rough for the many. Most people don't mind reasonable ads, and they don't mind contributing financially to a site they enjoy. Unfortunately all it takes is a few greedy jackass types taking the ads to extremes and ruin the concept entirely.

It's too bad there isn't a advertising standard that sites can be certified with and filters can be aware of. An ad whitelisting service, that legitimate companies would value as much as a BBB or google page ranking.

Re:Blocked because I'm paying for the pipe

[Anonymous Coward]

If the ad folks want to use MY bandwidth they should pay me for the privilege.

How about they give you free content instead of paying in cash?

Re:0 slowdown for me

[thomas.galvin]

I'm not even particularly zealous about killing ads, but if you're stalling out my webpage then it's in /etc/hosts for you.

Agreed. For the most part, I'm happy to let ads load, but there are four things that will get you added to my killfile real quick:

* Boobies (or anything else that might get me fired)
* Shaking, flashing, screen grabbing, "look at me!" type stuff
* Fake dialogs and error messages
* Slowdown

I just started filtering for the last one recently. For about a week straight I kept seeing "waiting for ads.doubleclick.so.goram.slow" in my status bar, and eventually I just adblocked their entire domain.

Also, slashcode is apparently unable to figure out what to do with ul and li tags.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[PitaBred]

They are worth it, though. The mouth-breathing morons who can't block ads like we do are the types to click on the ads or punch the monkey. I consider annoying ads a "tax" for people who can't be bothered to educate themselves marginally about the exceptionally complex system they want information from.

Re:use firefox and adblocker!

[ajs318]

Quicker way:

$ sudo echo "127.0.0.1 www.block.this.site" >> /etc/hosts

No need to muck about with vi. (If you do want to advise people to use vi, it's good form then to tell them the exact keystrokes they will need. Some people aren't as smart or brave as the secretaries who used to work for AT&T, and do actually get put off by a screenful of tildes, a beep every time they press a key and no obvious way out. So: shift+G to Go to the end of the file; a to enter append mode; type the extra line; ESC to get out of {or escape from} append mode; shift+Z, shift+Z to save and exit {go to sleep ZZ}.)