
Fast Ads Matter - feross
https://web.dev/fast-ads-matter/
======
akersten
The fastest ads are the ones that never load at all. Not sorry Google, that
ship has sailed long ago when ads became a delivery mechanism for malware and
tracking.

> Since fast ads result in improved user experience metrics, a focus on
> improving ad speed may decrease the incentive for users to install ad
> blockers.

I think making this conclusion from the data in the linked adblock report is a
bizarre interpretation of that data.

~~~
robbrown451
I get it that you (and many here) don't like ads, what do you mean by "that
ship sailed long ago"? That Google should just close up shop and go home?

Advertising exists. You can't make it go away. You can make it less bothersome
to most people.

And I'm having trouble understanding how you say their conclusion (which
simply said it "may" decrease the incentive) is so bizarre. Are you assuming
that everyone out there views ads the way you do?

~~~
journalctl
You can’t make it go away? Who made it in the first place? The natural state
of the universe is no advertising. It’s not as though a “You’re the
1,000,000th visitor to this site!” banners popped into existence three
femtoseconds after the Big Bang.

~~~
katzgrau
I'd disagree. Advertising exists in very subtle forms such as mere persuasion
and even more subtly, plain information. The background radiation present in
the cosmos advertises the big bang's existence.

~~~
labster
I’m still waiting for the 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale on Big Bangs before I buy.

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applecrazy
I wouldn't block ads if they were only static images loaded from a web server,
with the only click/impression tracking being web server log scraping. No JS,
cross-site tracking, malware.

Bonus points for being SVGs and thereby saving my bandwidth and looking nice
across all resolutions.

~~~
thanhhaimai
Just curious, what's your solution to frauds and bot clicks on static images
without client side scripting/cross site tracking?

~~~
toast0
CPA (cost per acquisition) seemed like it was gaining steam over CPC (cost per
click) and CPM (cost per thousand views) when I left Yahoo! in 2011.

Did that not go anywhere?

~~~
manigandham
Vast majority still backs into a CPM. CPC/CPA is mostly by the
affiliate/performance advertisers.

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samschooler
It’s been up for 2 days, and was removed sometime today.

Here’s the archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191031023005/https://web.dev/f...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191031023005/https://web.dev/fast-
ads-matter/)

~~~
saagarjha
It's still up for me.

~~~
samschooler
If its up for you, that means there was a ~3 hour where it was down. That's
odd.

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Smaug123
Gwern notes an observed 10-15% decrease in traffic while A/B-testing banner
ads, at [https://www.gwern.net/Ads;](https://www.gwern.net/Ads;) and those ads
were quite discreet. That article contains a summary of some other ad-related
results, all showing a similar decline in traffic in other places (including
in an audio context), which weakly suggests that however fast your ads load,
you're still going to drop >5% of your users simply by the fact of having ads
at all.

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musicale
Well the 404 page for the story link loaded pretty quickly. ;-)

There really isn't anything wrong with sidebar ads served from the same
domain. Simple image/text/html, loads almost instantly, cacheable, etc.. Bonus
is that ads can be based on web page content and you don't need to track your
users.

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otabdeveloper4
I work in advertising, and have been for over 15 years. Two points to make:

a) Advertising is (and always has been), fundamentally, the application of
data science to drive return-on-investment decisions. Any company that can do
data science and understands RoI will eventually converge to be an advertising
company. Calls for Google to "find a product to sell instead of being an
advertising company" are calls for Google to throw away their data science
expertise. Not gonna happen.

b) Breaking adblockers is a technically solved problem; just serve web pages
as server-rendered blobs. (Think 'flash pages' of yore.) We're not doing it
yet because the proportion of adblock users is still too small to make this
profitable.

But if this proportion changes in the future, so will the web. So calls for
more adblocking are just calls for a vastly more closed and proprietary web
than today.

That is probably not what you really want.

~~~
satori99
>Breaking adblockers is a technically solved problem; just serve web pages as
server-rendered blobs.

Can you elaborate on this a little? How does this win the ad-block arms race?

~~~
otabdeveloper4
If your webpage is a binary blob - for example, several megabytes of
webassembly that unpacks an encrypted payload onto a randomly-generated DOM -
then adblockers would have to disassemble the thing and run heuristics to
figure out which part of the page is ads and which are innocent images and
text.

Which is impossible to do without horrible false-positives. The arms race
between ever-increasing heuristics complexity on the adblocker side and the
webpage cloaking ads as content is a race that the adblockers cannot win.

~~~
satori99
Ok. So, at that point, you are practically downloading a binary executable,
which uses browser API's as it standard lib, per site.

You're right I think, it would become very difficult to create client side
heuristics to identify the advertisement elements in the way it is currently
done.

But who knows? Maybe machine learning based solutions will become necessary?
Maybe dedicated recognition FPGAs?

The war will probably continue for some time.

~~~
otabdeveloper4
Not really, because a) people aren't willing to put up with false positives
(i.e., adblockers hiding the meme cat photos you were looking for), and b)
people aren't willing to pay money to hide ads.

The real solution is getting rid of intrusive and/or annoying ads, but that
would mean sites with tightly curated audiences; no clickbait, SERP spam and
other stupid audience-inflating crap.

Ultimately intrusive ads happen because publishers are in a rush to monetize
traffic that advertisers view as cheap/low quality. It becomes a downwards
spiral of attract low-quality eyeballs -> ad spendings plummet -> devote more
screen share to annoying ads -> viewership falls -> attract more low-quality
eyeballs -> etc.

Maybe at some point we'll hit rock bottom and things will start improving.

~~~
lifthrasiir
> a) people aren't willing to put up with false positives (i.e., adblockers
> hiding the meme cat photos you were looking for)

You can estimate the actual ratio of false positives by examining existing
automation solutions based on image recognition. As a very rudimentary
example, I have successfully used Sikuli [1] for various tasks including a
program running "binary blobs". Unless you mix contents and ads altogether
(and I personally think that it is fine as long as the ad is properly marked!
It is at least a kind of contents, just that what I don't want generally
though.) you can't ramp the false positive ratio up beyond a certain level.

[1] [http://www.sikuli.org/](http://www.sikuli.org/)

------
habosa
Aside: that page loaded crazy fast but is anyone else seeing bad scrolling
performance? It's strangely choppy on Chrome using my original Pixel XL in a
way that HN and other sites are not.

~~~
jayd16
Its noticeable on my chromebook as well.

~~~
habosa
Filed, they're gonna fix it:
[https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/issues/1811](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/issues/1811)

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Animats
Slow ad popups are better. Often you can close them before they render fully.

~~~
paulie_a
Personally I just hit the back button on those sites. It's obnoxious behavior.

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egdod
The tracking scripts are what I hate most about modern adtech. Coincidentally,
they are also the reason ads are so resource-heavy and slow.

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ykevinator
Yes users are happy when they see ads in some circumstances (when they are
fast). This is a stupid premise.

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radicalriddler
I'm getting a 404, maybe someone accidentally released it?

