Linked by David Adams on Fri 19th Mar 2010 21:07 UTC
Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.
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RE: Ad-server latency blocking content
by morglum666 on Sun 21st Mar 2010 14:07
in reply to "Ad-server latency blocking content"
Member since:2005-07-06
I actually have similar experiences to you. I read two pages a minute (I forget the actual rate) and the greatest lag that I experience would be the ad servers, if I didn't adblock them.
I consume a great deal of news and information daily so I use the fasted browser I can which is currently Chrome.
I am terribly, terribly annoyed when an ad is not just slow but it does something really rude like talk to you (and somehow in the maximum volume possible).
My users at work are largely still on IE 6 so this is generally something I only have to experience when working on one of their machines.
The other side of this is if we had a perfect world where advertisements were not virus-payload instruments or launched giant ads that crippled your pcs (like flash - the root of all evil) is that based on the description in the article it looks like the cost of actually serving news is being passed down and down the chain until someone blinks.
The problem here is that in the comparison with Ars technica, they are a site with a considerable amount of depth to them and you might consider them both a news side and a technical resource. That might be worth money to me; however osnews as remarkable as it is exists as a news site only.
I don't subscribe to any physical newspapers and I'm not against paying; but you would be competing with a significant amount of other sites in a capitalistic way. If any of them are 80, 85, 90% as good and they are free, you might just lose me forever.
If nothing else, I will consider removing ad-block for osnews out of respect for the owner.
Morglum
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
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2006-04-16
There is another issue not mentioned here: the fact that ad-load times frequently dominate the total rendering time for the page I want to see. Occasionally, I'll have an attempt to load a page "freeze" for a minute or more while the ad-server is lazily serving its content, and then everything else downloads and the browser renders the page in five seconds or less.
If an ad-server has the effect of blocking the page content, it is doing the web publisher a serious disservice: users will either go away from the page and quite possibly never go back, or else will black-list the ad-server.
There are two sides to a social contract, and ad vendors need to uphold their side.
FWIW.