Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike

miller60 writes "Advertising networks are being cited as the major bottlenecks in performance woes experienced by major news sites during the crush of Internet traffic Thursday as news broke about the death of pop star Michael Jackson. An analysis by Keynote found that many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads. The inclusion of third-party content on high-traffic pages is a growing challenge for site operators. It's not just ads, as social media widgets are also seeing wider usage on commercial sites. How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"

Ad Caching?

[eldavojohn]

Many news web sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers.

Luckily I don't deal with ads. But if I did, I would try to work something out where I'd have a temporary directory with the cached ads ... especially if they were some hit-the-monkey-resource-intensive-flash-ad. Then I'd have a cron job or maybe just a servlet running on a timer that queries my ad provider's site for new ads, replace the ads in the directory with their names being generic so that they can be randomly selected based on size and ... you're a whole lot nicer for the internet. Sure, now it's your traffic that's being taxed but at least you're not taking part in a massive attack on your ad server.

I understand the beauty of not knowing anything about the ads and just getting whatever AdSense or AdWords or whoever serves you up your ads ... but when they're hogs like the article's flash ads are, you would expect some better design or fallback.

Not only during the MJ-news breaking...

[anomnomnomymous]

I can see how the ads would be the bottleneck in serving a site... if not only because it's the same case for users with most sites on normal days too.
Very often I'm stuck waiting for the ads to load, before the actual site shows up on computers where I don't have the luxury of an adblocker; And even with an adblocker I sometimes see my computer still using some resources to get the ads down.

Re:No surprise

[iamapizza]

The ads are usually javascript scripts which in turn are requesting external pages by document.write()ing out iframes to the content page which in turn may have their own resources (js/css/jpg/gif/etc) to request. A lot of browsers don't like showing you the entire page until the javascript bits have been requested, hence the delay.

Of course the technical details are er... more detailed, but you get the idea.

Re:Easy solution.

[VShael]

I've shown some non-geek friends of mine that there is nothing wrong with their web browser, or their laptop, or their internet connection. Web browsing is really very fast, provided you turn off advertising.

I set them up with a combo of Ad Block Plus on Firefox, and a customised hosts file. They can't believe the difference.

Well, duh.

[Animats]

only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads.

Well, duh. I've been complaining about this for the past year. Too much ad code is using "document.write()", often for no really good reason. Browsers can load content from multiple sites in parallel, and not wait for ad content, unless Javascript is used to prevent that. All too often, Javascript is used in just that way. (As on, well, Slashdot. Earth to Slashdot: your Javascript is embarrassingly slow. Get someone with a clue.)

One of the more painful things I have to do for AdRater [sitetruth.com] is to recognize dynamically loaded ad content. Google ads are loaded using at least five completely different code styles. So I actually have to look at other people's ad-serving code in some detail. It's not fun. Fortunately, one generic mechanism handles most of the cases; I don't have to track their code changes in detail.

Most of this doesn't seem to be intended to get around ad-blocking software, and isn't successful at that. It's usually either tracking-related, concerned with displaying the ad in a different CSS context than that of the surrounding content, or just the result of ineptly cutting and pasting JavaScript from multiple sources.

The how and why

[NudeAvenger]

first of all let me pretext all this with the fact I have been working in online advertising for about 5 years for a caouple of major publishers and now an agency side adserving company. The industry as a whole has a glut of technical knowledge and is mostly sales driven. Calls to adservers usually use a call to an external javascript file which is dynamically generated by the adserver. When this call is made it passes along some variables to let the adserver know how that position is targeted. At this time some tracking also happens, so the system will count an impression against a certain ad. For this reason caching can't be done - the system has to record and decide which ad to return on the fly to make sure delivery is correct and possibly even do some optimizations around which ad to show. Think of it as a giant decision engine which also collects data and uses that to decide what to serve next. There is another way to call in an ad, and that is to use Iframes, unfortunately these will point at a different domain so it isn't possible to resize or do anything outside the box, unless the ad being served is a rich media provider who are allowed to have another little html page on the site's domain they can call up and then use to write back to the main page. Because of all the different types of javascript that can be served back depending on the company providing the ad, the ad has to be put in place if using javascript as it will often look at where in the DOM the script is called. There are too many providers doing different things, and the only way to make things work is to call it straight in.