
The Cost of Mobile Ads on News Websites - dekayed
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html
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Spooky23
This is what annoys me about the supposed moral hazard around ad blocking.
Content sites, particularly news providers have no respect for their users and
just pile layer upon layer of crap.

At one point the huge org I worked for blocked all ads for local newspapers.
Not because we hate ads, but because they were frequently used to deliver
malware, and in one case malware suspected to be targeted at our organization.

We called the media outlet and even offered to help, but were rebuffed. So
screw them I say.

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pbnjay
Fine print at the bottom:

> The data does not account for text compression, which reduces the size of
> text files.

I feel like this hugely downweights the differences, HTML and JS compress very
well so this means images and other Ad data really take a huge chunk of the
bandwidth.

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piratebroadcast
Pretty terrible name for the article. It should be "The Bandwidth Cost of
Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites"

~~~
chrismbarr
They do show the real dollar cost as well. I assume this is if you had to pay
for each MB of data usage though.

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gypsy_boots
I think what piratebroadcast meant is that the title of the article makes it
sound like it will be about what advertisers have to pay to advertise on 50
different websites

~~~
jlgaddis
That's what I was expecting when I clicked on the link.

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avalexandrov
30 seconds of loading just for ads?! Come on, this is ridiculous. I know they
are supported by ads, but this excessive advertising is not the way to do it.
There must be a better way.

~~~
vinceyuan
I agree. Some famous website has even longer loading time. See the discuss on
HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940202)

~~~
avalexandrov
Yeah, recently I stopped going there entirely. Mostly because of their heavy
website, but also because of their clickbaity non-stories.

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runako
I found the comparisons wanting, as they only estimated the delays caused by
the downloading of the data. They apparently made no attempt to measure the
performance impact of actually running all the trackers/ads in the browser.
From results posted elsewhere, I believe this is also a meaningful amount of
time for many sites.

So the net improvement of an ad blocker may be even higher than stated here.

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Bedon292
This is what really annoys me about not being able to block ads on Android. I
am really hoping content blockers on iOS will convince Google to do it as
well. 30 seconds of ads for an 8 second page is unacceptable. Not only that
but the potential for malware with no protection is huge. Who knows what those
ads are able to send back in tracking, or inject into the phone.

~~~
sigmar
>not being able to block ads on Android

Not only are there multiple browsers that block ads on android (including
firefox, Adblock Browser for Android, nochromo). There are also non-root apps
that block ads in other apps by using an on-device proxy (ad blockplus,
adguard). There are also very powerful root apps that remove ads from browsers
and apps (such a minminguard, which eliminates app ads entirely so that it
doesn't even leave behind an empty UI box).

~~~
Bedon292
Right, I definitely phrased it badly. Content blockers on iOS are very
different than using a specific browser on Android though. Proxying though abp
and adguard has been a pain to set up in my experience. Though I have not done
so recently. I was unaware of minminguard, and will check it out later today,
but again not a simple OS level solution like content blockers.

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coldcode
I expect big sites to start serving ads in a way that appears to be organic
and would be hard to block. As long as people serve ads direct from ad network
domains blocks is fairly easy. If the content looks like part of an article
then it's much more difficult to differentiate.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
TV tried this - remember Bones one season how every episode she'd demonstrate
to Booth how her iPhone worked? Or on Elementary how Sherlock would flip open
his Surface in the john and send an email, while the camera lovingly watched
over his shoulder?

Viewers rebel, ratings drop, and directors quickly ban such perversions of
their art. Its not sustainable. Will you read articles on HN that are half
ads? Neither will I.

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akshayB
Reason why I started using Adblock is because of NFL.com

If you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play you will end up watching a
commercial first. Super annoying !!!!

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digitalneal
Classic poem with a modern twist..

First they came for the computer game developers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a computer game developer.

Then they came for the Musicians, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a
Musician.

Then they came for the the film makers, and I did not speak out—Because I did
not make movies.

Then they came for news—and there was no one left to speak for me.

~~~
Terr_
You've got it backwards: The travesty of degrading things with shitty
advertisements was _early_ in the News sector.

