
Why Web Pages Suck - msabalau
https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/
======
imgabe
AdBlock renders most advertising a moot point. What's far more annoying is how
every website insists on blocking out the page with a popover asking me to
sign up for their newsletter when I'm not even halfway done reading the
article. Does this actually work? Do people actually sign up for newsletters
from these things? Usually it makes me just abandon whatever I was reading
because I want nothing to do with such an obnoxious website.

~~~
joshstrange
Those are the worst, it's gotten to the point that I couldn't even tell you
what is on those popups. If I'm reading an article and you get in my way I
will close the distraction so fast that there is zero chance I will even see
what you were saying AND now I'm pissed at you.

~~~
code_duck
Sometimes I can't tell what's on the pop overs because they don't work
properly on my phone. So I start reading an article and then the whole thing
is overlaid with dark grey and I can't scroll...

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notjustanymike
This article misses one key point: sales and product people.

Specifically, sales and product people who neither understand nor care about
user experience. These are the kinds of people who say yes to every deal,
since the only metric they are judged by is quarterly income. Typically these
people are also (rightfully so) terrified of losing their jobs. So they close
tons of ad deals, by which point it's too late for the developers to stop
them.

Back when I worked for Newsweek they were the biggest barrier to a quality
user experience. The site developers _wanted_ to built and the site had to was
the main reason I left that industry behind.

~~~
smacktoward
But this is a double-edged sword, is it not? I mean, "the site the developers
want to build" will invariably be a site with no ads whatsoever. It loads so
_fast!_ Look at how _clean_ the code is! Then everybody loses their job
because there's no actual revenue.

In theory, reconciling these opposing forces should be what top management
does. In reality, top management is usually too terrified to do so, because
they're subject to the same pressures the sales people are: they have
corporate masters of their own, demanding a revenue chart that always drives
up and to the right, who will cheerfully throw them overboard the moment they
appear to not be 100% behind that goal. So it's ads ahoy and UX take the
hindmost.

~~~
emodendroket
Well it'd be a pretty unusual graph if it did not go to the right.

~~~
Chinjut
Stop drawing revenue, and the graph _will_ eventually stop going to the
right...

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OopsCriticality
I look forward to the day that the tech industry realizes not everyone is on
(or can get access to) an unlimited broadband connection.

The modern ad-filled web is devistating if you're not on broadband. A site
like iMore (I think Gruber was too kind—I find the content to be regurgitated
dreck) is unbrowsable for someone like my parents on a satellite internet
connection: takes way too long to load, and costs quite a bit of money to
view. They're not even rural, just a little too far for DSL, and the cable
franchise agreement isn't required to cover them. I understand that content
creators have bills to pay, but you're shooting yourselves in the foot re your
available viewership when you take it to the extreme of iMore. It's easy to
pick on iMore, but it's the same story for many other websites.

~~~
joshstrange
> I look forward to the day that the tech industry realizes not everyone is on
> (or can get access to) an unlimited broadband connection.

I think the day when everyone is on (or can get access to) an unlimited (or
unlimted-enough) broadband connection will come first

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chipotle_coyote
I'm not sure people are picking up on what Thompson's arguing here; he's
looking at it from the business side, not the tech side, and making a
prediction that strikes me as worryingly plausible.

Essentially, he's arguing that the refusal of most readers to pay for content
combined with the way advertising has made the web suck -- and is encouraging
an ever-larger number of people to block advertising entirely -- is creating a
scenario that leaves one practical option: driving content off the open web.
This is exactly what Facebook's Instant Articles, Apple News, Flipboard and
similar services are betting on -- creating environments where loading times
are much faster, the reading experience is generally more pleasant, and
advertising is by and large less intrusive than what we're increasingly ending
up with on the web:

 _The future for most publishers is likely that of pure content production
only, save for the few who are destination sites capable of selling native
advertising in stream or selling subscriptions. What is very much in question
is exactly how users will feel when they finally get what they claim they wish
for._

This ultimately isn't a question about AdBlock and loading times, it's a
question about how to pay for content. If neither of the predominant payment
models on the open web -- advertising and subscriptions -- turn out to be
viable, if we want content producers to stay on the open web we need to come
up with better answers than "hey, I'm sure there will always be people out
there willing to produce everything we want at the highest possible quality
level without worrying about how they'll get money for it."

~~~
qu4z-2
Yeah. It'd be a shame if the ad-supported model stops being viable, and sites
like www.gwern.net stop being able to produce quality content.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Have basic income,keep www.gwern.net.The current model isn't the only
alternative.

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jackgavigan
I've found that installing Ghostery has vastly improved my web browsing
experience.

It's not just adverts, though - the amount of pointless javascript on web
pages these days is almost embarassing. The concept of optimizing web pages
for quick loading and judder-free browsing seems to be completely lost on
today's web designers.

~~~
ChrisLTD
That's absolutely true. I'd also like to add that there is an explosion in
ancillary imagery and video that often measure in megabytes. Do we really need
all those parallaxed full-screen background images?

~~~
dorgo
we need way better compression algorithms

~~~
imgabe
Something with optimal tip-to-tip efficiency

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shanecleveland
I don't mind most advertising. As with magazines and newspapers, I mostly
ignore them, until I am interested in something. It was amazing how much more
I was inclined to look at ads in the newspaper while we were building a house
(a lot of stuff to buy!). Ad-blockers are silly. To demand the web to be free
and then block the one avenue for revenue available is completely
contradictory. Content is not free! Can they be better optimized? Of course.
Let the users and search engines flesh out the good from the bad.

What I really hate are site pop-ups that suddenly interrupt reading and play
hide and seek with the "close" option. That's the last way to get my feedback
or make me a subscriber. but it must work!

~~~
klum
Presumably, for advertising to work, your ad has to stand out. If every ad
tries to stand out more and more compared to other ads, the result is more and
more invasive ads. I'm not an expert on the matter, but it seems to me like
the free-stuff-sponsored-by-advertising model isn't very sustainable. On the
other hand, I do like free stuff as much as everyone else.

~~~
vectorjohn
Of course it's sustainable. It's sustainable forever until there is some other
option. TV and news paper and magazines never found an alternative. If someone
can think of one, they'll get very wealthy I'm sure.

~~~
vitd
TV found several better models. PBS asks the public directly to give them
money, and they allow corporations to buy sponsorships which don't interrupt
the content. HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. have subscribers who pay directly
for the privilege of watching their shows. Netflix delivers ad-free content to
your home either via postal mail or network for a fee. There are plenty of
other models available to try out.

~~~
shanecleveland
In many cases PBS does interrupt their content to solicit donations – but you
do get a coffee mug and tote bag. Is it better, as you suggest? Maybe. An
alternative, certainly. Don't see many others doing it.

Akin to a "Donate" button on a website. How well does that work for most?

~~~
vitd
I've never seen them interrupt a show in progress. I've seen them do pledge
drives where they preempt a show, but I haven't ever had something I was
watching on PBS be interrupted, personally. Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe
they do it differently in the places I've lived?

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spankalee
I think there's too much blame being placed on programmatic advertising.
That's no excuse for 14MB pages, fixed position ads, trackers pinging the
network for a full minute, etc.

There's no inherent reason why so much of the cost of ad networks, tracking
(regardless of the arguments about tracking itself), and ad content needs to
be born by the user. Better ad stacks should, and probably already do, exist,
but it seems like most publishers and ad networks are lazy, incompetent, or
both, and with iOS9 they'll soon see that they've shot themselves, and
everyone else, in the foot.

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JoelSutherland
This linked article that talks about web pages sucking is 1.3mb and is first
visible/readable after 4.9 seconds:

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_SE_YM1/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_SE_YM1/)

An article from the site it complains about sure uses a lot more bandwidth
(2.9mb) but at least it's visible/readable in 2.2 seconds:

[http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_KC_YQK/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150715_KC_YQK/)

The bandwidth/resource waste sure sucks but having ads load asynchronously
isn't as bad as a blank screen for 5 seconds.

~~~
pbh101
Visible, but not necessarily readable: "This does not necessarily mean the
user saw the page content" [1]

[1]: [https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-
webpag...](https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-
webpagetest/quick-start-quide#TOC-Start-Render):

~~~
JoelSutherland
The link I added has a filmstrip view where you can verify that this isn't the
case. Alternatively visit the two sites yourself! The multi-second difference
is perceptible to a human being.

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qwtel
> Advertising should be respectful of the user’s time, attention, and battery
> life.

This struck me. I think it's the other way around: Users should be respectful
of advertising, or, since this sounds ridiculous: Pay for content. Everything
else seems unsustainable (and the status quo seems pretty unsustainable, hence
1 minute tracking traffic).

I'm wondering if the free-everything web only evolved due to the lack of a
proper built-in payment method or if there is an underlying economic reason
(the near-zero cost of publishing?) that would have forced the current
situation anyway.

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reilly3000
The underlying issue here is not programmatic advertising, but the
proliferation of content itself. The cost of setting up a publishing operation
is effectively zero, and anybody who wants to publish online is. The value of
an impression will continue to slip as long as it more and more content
becomes available and more of it is consumed.

It is unrealistic to expect or hope that the supply content should be
restrained. The other side of the equation is advertiser demand, and that is
restrained by complexity at this present moment: The best DSPs (demand side
platforms, or ad-buying tools) are typically met with very high minimums
(10K/month to 250K/year) because the cost of supporting advertisers with
account reps is so high. Yes, ad tech stacks are also pretty damn hard to
build, but most at this point are built for scale.

My vision for my company is to democratize the advertising process so that
access to the best tools, talent, and strategy is available to anybody with a
message to share. If we can pull that off well, anybody that aggregates a
quality audience with media should be able to benefit from their effort.
Eventually individuals should be able to freely pay for the content they
choose with their attention itself, detached from the act of consuming a
specific piece of content.

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JustSomeNobody
It delights me to no end that we are starting to see people take notice the
slowdown of the web and the overuse of unnecessary libs and frameworks.

*Note: I did not in any way say frameworks and libs are unnecessary. I know people will read it that way, however, so this is to clarify for them.

~~~
emodendroket
...Not really relevant to this article, which is about ad networks.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
One of the first links from the article:

[http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-
we...](http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-websites/)

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sktrdie
I don't understand why everything we do in society has to rely on capitalist
concepts. The internet has shown that we can have a system that works without
the usual capitalist market concepts that are somewhat needed in the "real
world".

Via decentralized applications, we're seeing that we can build services that
are not powered by hungry corporations which sponsor segregation, unethical
behaviors, inequalities, competition and destruction. Instead they're powered
by the people that use them.

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angst_ridden
A healthy installation of Ghostery, Facebook Blocker, and Flashblock has a
fair amount of overlap, but seems to improve my web experience a great deal.

I used to have AdBlock in the mix, but I develop web sites, and sometimes you
actually need to have a div called "ad" or "adv" when you're integrating other
people's code. It's hard to develop sites when those divs just vanish.

~~~
white-flame
That's why it's nice to have multiple web browsers installed, or have multiple
accounts or VMs with their own browser configurations, leaving your main
personal browser config exactly how you'd prefer to have it.

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kasajian
I think it's interesting that anyone would use the iMore web site. I looked at
it, and if I had accidentally stumbled upon it, I would immediately run a way.
When a web-site response so poorly, I just feel like I can spend my time else-
where. Does anyone disagree? If so, what would cause you to go to that site?

~~~
mturmon
You have a point about the clickbaity look of the site.

The editor, Rene Ritchie, has a following. He was relatively early to iPhone
punditry, and there is a perception that his opinions are well-founded.

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Yhippa
It sounds that content creators are going to be funneled through walled
gardens to survive and that I'm going to be required to use those services to
get content. Otherwise it seems that it's going to be more expensive to go do
it on your own and not go through Apple or Facebook.

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astazangasta
This is not why web pages suck, this is why society sucks. The smartest minds
of our generation are being employed all over the Valley to build this crap.
This humongous waste of talent is a great travesty.

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Zikes
> iMore is not the exception — they’re the norm.

[citation needed]

Sure there's a lot of sites out there with ridiculous page sizes, but I'd
hardly call 10+MB "the norm".

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tosseraccount
[... description of ad bidding ... ] _All of this happens on a just-in-time
basis_

I had to chuckle at that.

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byron_fast
Divide the bytes by 10 and we are in 1998... The suck level remains the same.

