Ad Networks the Laggards In Jackson Traffic Spike 176
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?"
Didn't notice... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:4, Funny)
Hope you don't mind, but I'm using your ad server too.
Dang you must have one hell of a pipe to the internets.
It's....FAST
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Yes, we all get it. Lots of Slashdotters block ads. We know. We've read it a million times on this site. Could you just shut the hell up so we can comment on the actual story? Thank you.
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:5, Funny)
The worst part about stories like this is having to skip past the 3 dozen Slashdot posts that all say "I don't see ads because I block them! Hyuk! Hyuk!"
Sounds like you need an AdBlock Ad Blocker. It hides any posts that may be construed as viral advertisements to block advertisements from your browser. It allows those like you and me to learn about new car insurance rates and punch the monkey in peace.
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think those comments can be meaningful. I avoid doing massive ad blocking, but in some cases, I've blocked ads from locations that created major slowdown in page loads.
It's an example of why ad delivery services are failing us: In modern browsers, delays for ad loading do happen from time to time, regardless of the size of your internet tubes. Bad performance makes even users that aren't ad averse want to block them, just for the performance gain, just like aggressive DRM makes users that have no problem paying for software be tempted to become pirates.
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Nope. We will just block comments like yours, that complain without adding anything to the story. ^^
Re:Didn't notice... (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. I have a lighttpd instance running on my computer just for this reason. It serves up a single page containing only the following text:
404 - ad fail
And if anyone is wondering why I'm running an HTTP server just for this it's because serving the 404 kills the request much quicker than letting the browser timeout the connection. Lighttpd is very light on resources but also allows me to have access logs, which allows me to get some interesting data. For instance, I split the logs up by month and here are some of the sizes:
I've also written a perl script to import the logs into an SQLite database. Which allows things like:
All hosts blocked with over 1,000 hits (from the aforementioned April to June logs)
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I have a lighttpd instance running
Mongoose [google.com] would probably be even better.
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Why would you need a server unless you have broken firewall rules. Your localhost should simply return TCP reset, which is much faster than having to actually service a page request.
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reflows (Score:3, Interesting)
Can someone explain to me why this phenomenon occurs? Is content loaded serially, one item at a time?
Reflow is my best guess. The browser has all the data for the rest of the page, but it doesn't know what width and height to give to an ad object until it has loaded.
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Obviously not, as some major sites were hit by this issue. What it comes down to is that the owners of these new organizations picked the advertising service they thought would give them the most money - not the ones that would ensure the highest reliability or the best user experience. This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
Re:Reflows (Score:4, Insightful)
...This shows the state that news organizations have reached, making money is more important than reporting the news.
I don't ever recall a time when the news wasn't just one more service to trade with you for advertising. When has the news ever been not about making money?
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Well, that and the actual loading of the image itself. A lot of these sites will delay the rendering until all the images are pre-loaded, and with the ad sites getting hammered, that could take a good while.
One more reason to hate ad servers. I'm not an adblock fanatic, but I block doubleclick and all the other big ad houses by default. Some site wants to serve it's own ads, and I'll never block that.
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Can someone explain to me why this phenomenon occurs? Is content loaded serially, one item at a time?
Because you're not blocking ads?
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally, a browser will open up to 4-5 connections per site. (This is configurable in firefox). If there are more requests needed, they'll reuse one of the existing connections (which don't close -- keep-alive).
The problem isn't loading, it's rendering. Many ad networks are heavy on the javascript and use stupid shit like document.write, and innerHTML. If the ad javascript is slow to load, the page rendering will stall.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the technical details are er... more detailed, but you get the idea.
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Poorly-designed sites. Many ad-serving networks will, by default, write out ads using Javascript's "document.write()", which means the browser can't complete the DOM tree until those ad servers respond. Since most browsers are set to only keep two active connections open at once, it's quite possible for both of those connections to be occupied by different "document.write()" scripts.
(With image requests, for example, the browser can continue rendering the page even if the image file isn't downloaded, becaus
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Or the site designers could, you know, write the page so that it'll still display the content correctly while the off-site content is loading. Actually, that should be the case for even the on-site content. Isn't that that whole point of "height" and "width" attributes?
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason they don't do that for ads is because the viewer "dwell time" on the page can often be less than the time it takes the ad to load.
Kills your click-through revenue if your page view never results in someone seeing the ad, so you force the ad to preload before you render the page.
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Re:No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point.
Yes, a browser should schedule the download of additional content, and it should give priority to same domain, next to different subdomains of same domain (e.g. "images.mysite.com") and last to other domains.
Of course, if that were the standard, the ad people would come up with something to defeat it. See, these are the people who are actively working on giving you content that you don't want, and they consider it important to bypass all your filters, to make sure you've seen their ads. Because you don't count, only our pageview or clickthrough does.
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Advertisers don't trust sites to host their images (how would they know how many were really served), they want to serve them themselves, so they can rotate them when they want, so they can set web bugs and/or cookies.
The good news is that makes it a lot easier to block ads, if they were just images in the same locations as normal illustrative images, you'd have no way to discriminate. So once you block the adv
Tune max RTT down (Score:2)
You can tune your max RTT down globally, but I don't know how to do that on a application by application basis. The default is usually 120 sec, which is in general, very generous by today's internet performance standards.
Ad Caching? (Score:2, Informative)
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'
Re:Ad Caching? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best way to deal with this sort of thing is to do regular checks as to how long hitting the address that's going to be loaded takes, in a cron job or whatever, and if it goes over a certain threshold, turn off that provider.
Sure, you'll lose a bit of ad revenue, but you won't have pissed off users who think your site is broken.
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Easy solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads. Or better yet, replace them with a text ad for AdBlock Plus [adblockplus.org]. Hey, a guy can dream, right?
Ryan Fenton
Easier solution. (Score:2)
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Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads.
Except you want to get paid for banners especially when you got the most visitors.
Control of the ad server (Score:2)
Whenever the ad servers get to a critical overusage point, replace them with a set of text ads.
Except you want to get paid for banners especially when you got the most visitors.
Control of the ad server gives economic control over the sites themselves. "Sorry 'bout that."
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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.
MJ Clogged the toobs? (Score:4, Funny)
I'll bet THAT isn't in the autopsy report.
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Where's the Billy Mays traffic spike?! (Score:3, Funny)
RIP, Billy Mays.
Billy Mays ordering at McDonalds [youtube.com]
.
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Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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Billy Mays RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Last week we had 3 celebrity deaths in rapid succession, but thanks to Billy Mays, he throws in a 4th one for ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!!
Aww come on! (Score:2, Funny)
Not only during the MJ-news breaking... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Without those ads, it would be worse (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's not a reasonable excuse for ad servers to often be slow as hell (note that I am on 768 kb/s), sometimes even right-out timing out.
Maybe some particularly popular sites should add a service-level clause for the ad providers (if they need more than 20 ms to prepare+transmit the ads, they must switch them off)?
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Re:Without those ads, it would be worse (Score:4, Insightful)
I think much of the issues of ads is that they do tend to ill integrated on the page and do not enhance the viewing experience. One issue is that a page may have to link with many domains, each involving multiple requests, and often the page will not render until all ads are loaded. This is fair, but, again, does mature media expect to be successful if they serve lame ads? Ads support content in a number of ways, but must not conflict with the content.
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Based on that premise, I have to conclude that no such thing as "successful advertising" exists, with the possible exception of Superbowl ads - And I wouldn't say they enhance the media itself, so much as they exist as content on their own (an idea supported by more people watching the halftime ads than the game itself).
How many of us would listen to the radio of watch TV if the ads were just 30 seconds of monotonous dron
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Actually, no. The vast majority of news sites are supported by ad revenue drawn from traditional sources: newsprint advertising/subscriptions, tv news advertising/cable subscriptions.
Online ad revenue isn't very profitable for anyone except the big ad services (e.g. doubleclick) and Google, and in both of those cases it's because of volume.
Most news sites can't make enough on online ads to support themselves. I mean, if sites like Facebook and Twitter can't support themselves on ads, then how do you think L
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I reject your idea that 'ads are necessary'.
you are stuck in the current way of (broken) thinking.
get out of this 'info must be free/beer' mentality.
people HAVE paid for things and will continue to do so.
people will go out of their way to AVOID ads. there's a gas station near me that has lcd monitors and they pump (heh) ads AT YOU while you are filling up the car. I never go there anymore and the few times I did, I started the pump, got RIGHT in my car and turned the stereo up to block them out. its anno
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I suspect there are more people like me than you. The current model works for us, even if it does not work for people like you who think advertising professionals are 'sickening' and that google is 'ruined' and 'USELESS JUNK'.
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on the basis of a sense of humour.
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Since 1984, no ads. (Score:2)
The fact that all the sites that are not pay sites are that way because of advertising.
Maybe this utter bullshit lets you sleep while annoying everyone on the internet, but I'm here to tell you your claim is not true. This must be what marketing types tell themselves, but--big surprise--marketing types LIE.
My web site has been up since 1997. It is not a pay site. It has no ads. Well, no paying ads--I do link to some sites to help them and I have a fake ad as well.
Hope I didn't accidentally destroy the internet by NOT collecting money. Fuckers....
That explains it! (Score:2)
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AdBlock... *Grovels before it.* You have saved my weekend from the nasty, nasty, nauty ad services.
To the masses that do not use AdBlock; get it, use it, pay the poor programmer for his diligent work.
Google and Slashdot handle it well (Score:3, Insightful)
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or just block them with adblock and keep your money.
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It does? (Score:2)
Try subscribing to one of the ad lists. Then they just disappear.
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Google and Slashdot handle it well
Then why, multiple times a day, do I have to hit ESC when there's a delay in loading whatever whoozit from "clients1.google.com." Don't tell me you've never seen that hostname in your status bar.
I suppose the opposite motivation exists but ... (Score:2)
it would seem easy enough with correct site coding / browser tabs [I admit to NOT being an html / css expert] to force the ads to load last so that at least the content loads regardless of the ads being slow / non-responsive. Of course the advertisers would rather be first so they get your eyeballs before all that uber-distracting content :-\
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correct, a simple javascript body.onLoad event would suffice to load all the advertisements after a page has loaded... however, this runs into the problem that people may be running with javascript turned off, in which case they won't see their adverts, which means javascript onload wouldn't work for everyone, and that's bad for advertisers businesses.
what actually happens is the web designer/programmer adds a script reference to another site (in the form of <script> tags) that link to another website
We have the tools (Score:2)
I disagree. With Javascript, AJAX, Silverlight, or likely even Flash, we can make changes to the DOM after the page has loaded. Loading adds after the page render completes is not the issue. Lazy web designers and poorly designed CMS coupled with the financial model tied to ad revenue is the issue.
-Rick
Mashups in general (Score:2)
I've seen this as a big issue with mashups of all sorts for a while.
When google was down a few months ago many sites I visited...including this one...had issues. Turns out that google was only down for my ISP due to a routing problem, but it didn't matter. The google analytics used by the site failed to load causing some weird issues. Just think how many sites are depenedent on services from third party's like google.
This to me is more of a general browser web 2.0 issue that needs to get addressed. If the a
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Load the ads last (Score:2)
Re:Load the ads last (Score:5, Insightful)
They *are* loading the "primary content" first. They just differ with you as to what constitutes "primary".
Stupid question but why... (Score:2)
Ok, I get the idea that you need ads on your site. And I fully understand that those ads are probably going to be served from an outside source who you don't have control over.
That being said, WHY, WHY, did you design your layout in such a way that a slow ad could slow down the page load? Aren't their about a hundred and one ways to slip ads into a page that ensure that the actual page loads and the ad just gets there when it gets there?
Cache? (Score:2)
content vs. performance tradeoffs (Score:2)
Slashdot also suffers from this. The solution is to feed the adverts directly to the site and then serve up dynamically created static pages.
so annoying (Score:3, Interesting)
When running on a browser without ad block, pages will take forever to load. The basic shell will come up but it will lag when feeding content from the advertiser servers. You cannot move on with your life until the ad loads and the page content will not load until the ad. Very annoying.
Also surprising is how much of the lag comes from the computer, not the bandwidth. I upgraded the home machine recently and am amazed at how quickly sites load now. I'd assumed previously that delays in loading were just waiting for data from the site but it appears that there's a lot of overhead with the bloat that is the modern browswer. I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
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NoScript - That's what I use. I don't have problems with image based ads, but Javascript & Flash content blocked by default.
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I'm guessing there's a lot of web 2.0 bullshit going on in the background. You can't escape it by disabling Javascript because that'll break most of the sites out there.
I use noscript and have only a handful of sites permanently enabled for javascript (in fact, I even removed most of the ones in the default whitelist that comes with it). And I'd say at least 80% of the websites I visit are perfectly functional without any javascript. Maybe not quite as "pretty" as they would be with javascript, but I've always been a function over form guy anyway.
Local caches. (Score:2)
I think adds shouldn't be delivered through a query while you're loading a page but rather cached on the content provider directly for faster delivery.
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Offtopic? Try insightful, I get enough of this drivel from all the other news outlets.
Ads? What ads? (Score:2)
> How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?
Privoxy does the job for me.
What are these 'ads' you speak of? (Score:2)
That explains it! (Score:2)
That explains why I didn't notice any slow downs because I use AdBlock Plus and many filters. ;)
WEDJE to the rescue (Score:2)
Looks promising; found this in a link from TFA:
score parent up .. (Score:2)
Looks like a solution
Well, duh. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Using javascript to create script nodes [yahoo.com] can get around this problem, but only if the script you're loading doesn't have (for example) document.write(). So it's useless for ads as they are currently done.
I've actually tr
The how and why (Score:3, Informative)
Misconception (Score:2)
... many news sites delivered their own content promptly, only to find their page delivery delayed by slow-loading ads... How best to balance the content vs. performance tradeoffs?"
Ads are not content (at least not for most viewers) - they are an annoyance. How to balance it? Get rid of the ads.
content vs. performance (Score:2)
Since when is an advertisement considered content ( to us regular folk, not the media giants that care more about the ad then the story, and often the story IS an ad )
Simple Text inserts (Score:2)
without any javascript or whatsoever. just some plain formatted html coming from the 3rd party. thats the deal.
Not shocking at all... (Score:2)
My favorite annoyance (Score:2)
..is when you go to a site, and visually, everything appears to be fine. Everything looks loaded up wonderfully, and you can use it as you please. However, firefox on its tab still perpetually says "Loading.....". I know it's ad-related. I just hit Stop and go along my way. Myspace is one of the worst offenders. guess they need more bandwidth to http://ads-featuring-gangsta-rappers.myspace.com./ [ads-featur...yspace.com]
Get some balls (Score:3, Insightful)
There is an easy solution to this problem. Take advertising back into your own hands. Don't sign up for some stupid ad network to shovel punch the monkey ads all your site. Forming a relationship with companies your viewers are actually interested in will deliver better results for the advertisers and for your visitors. Don't let them cover your page in huge javascript overlays and other nonsense, doing so shows they don't respect your content or your visitors. Yes, it takes more work, but the end result is better and more profitable.
They could... (Score:2)
Being a programmer, I have often dealt with these pesky little ads...the best thing they could ever do, is have a separate tag, that allows to set a timeout length of time for the ads to load, else they just bounce back not available. This would shorten the loading time of many windows, and could be a usable configuration flag set by the user of a browser.
Obviously, (Score:2)
The answer is for Michael Jackson not to die again.
Proper web site design would resolve that... (Score:2)
The Thriller Zombie Attack Strikes Again (Score:2)
Wait, who died? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'll just save my CA$28.92 and use the cross-platform AdBlock Plus [adblockplus.org], thank you very much. Admittedly, it does only work in Firefox, but I don't use any other browsers, and none of the applications I use regularly have forced ads.
Actually, the fact that AdMuncher can block ads inside other programs is very cool, even if they probably are just blocking requests to certain remote hosts.
--- Mr. DOS