The Real Cost of Mobile Ads 117
New submitter cvdwl writes: A New York Times (mildly paywalled) article and associated analysis discuss the consumer cost of mobile ads, assuming a US$0.01/MB data plan. The article provides one of the only estimates I've seen of the the real cost in time and money (and time is money) of mobile advertising. Ethics of ad-blockers aside, this highlights the hidden costs of data-heavy (often lazy and poorly developed) web-design. In a nutshell, the worst sites took 10-30s load 10-20MB, costing $0.15-0.40, over 4G due to a blizzard of video, heavy images, and occasionally just massive scripts. The best sites had high content to ad ratios, typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising.
Learn your mathematical operators (Score:5, Insightful)
typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising
I'm pretty sure that should be <500kB of advertising.
Learn to proofread. (Score:5, Interesting)
typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising
I'm pretty sure that should be <500kB of advertising.
Yep... mea culpa. As soon as I saw it go up, I cringed and went wildly searching for the edit function. And the sentence before that should read: ".. took 10-30s to load 10-20MB ...". Submit in haste, repent at leisure.
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To be fair a mistake like that in many places would be caught by an "editor."
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Well, what really bothers me is that a "good" website would have 1-3MB of content. For me, a good web page is mostly text, and rarely holds more than 20K of actual content.
Dude, you simply cannot do a decent animated kittycat gif with a 20K web page, so your analysis is obviously biased.
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Well, to be fair, the decent animated kittycat is probably only 20k, but there are 80k DRM headers involved, too.
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So many developers reflexively include tons of jQuery and Bootstrap CSS/JS files, 99% of which aren't used on the entire site. Just because that's the only way some people know how to "code" web sites. When you add in jQueryUI and a bunch of FontAwesome fonts that aren't used either, I'm surprised some people could write a single "Hello World" page in under 20MB.
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But that is true for all modern developers and all modern platforms.
IMO blaming developers is useless.
Or think of it in terms of the desktop software development: one does not have to bundle megabytes of libraries and frameworks with you desktop application, because they are already preinstalled by the OS.
Web? The mindless application of the "because security" argument made it impossible to even bundle something like jQuery with the browser. All sites use their own (often identical) versions and fetch
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I'm just pleased someone knows how to put > and < symbols into a Slashdot posting.
I was fearing that HTML entities were becoming a lost art.
Greater than or less than (Score:2)
The best sites had high content to ad ratios, typically loading 1-3MB of content and >500kB of advertising.
I guess somebody doesn't know than > means greater than, and would make the site worse, not better.
In other words ... (Score:4, Insightful)
We pay to be spied on via analytics, and potentially have malware delivered through badly written ad platforms, and as a result we effectively subsidize the profits of ad companies.
At least, I assume it is, NYT is paywalled and I've blocked them in my browser entirely.
Tell you what, let the ad companies pay for all that cellular data and see what they do. Because I assume millions and millions of dollars are used daily to deliver their "product".
Ad blocking is about security, it's about privacy, and it's about making the best use of a metered resource.
Re:In other words ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ad blocking is about security, it's about privacy, and it's about making the best use of a metered resource.
No, it's not.
Script blocking is about all those things, ad blocking is simply about not wanting to see ads, but still wanting to use a site or an app.
Ads serve malware, track you, and waste your bandwidth. Which part of that are you claiming isn't true?
Re:In other words ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many sites today also are designed to work only if you have scripts active, which means that blocking scripts renders the site unusable.
Re:In other words ... (Score:5, Informative)
I consider that to be a good thing. It tells me the back button is necessary.
At a minimum allowing every site to run arbitrary code is moronic. Which means I need to know if I care enough about your content and have any trust in you before I allow you to run scripts. And I use plugins to severely limit those.
All those 3rd parties embedded in a web page? Sorry, but I trust them not at all. I don't have a trust relationship with them, I don't have a business relationship with them. They're just the parasites lurking in your website ... they're the shit on the shoes of the internet.
So, here on Slashdot? As I type this, gstatic.com, amazonws.com, google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, ntv.io, ooyala.com, rpxnow.com, scorecardresearch.com, taboola.com, doubleclick, janrain ... absolutely NONE of these are entities I care to allow to monitor where I go. They're ruthlessly blocked pretty much everywhere.
They don't get to set cookies, or run script, or server images, or style sheets ... because they are not entities I have a relationship with, other than the fact I want nothing at all to do with them.
So, I'm sorry that companies partner with entities we don't trust as part of their revenue model. But it doesn't mean that I have any obligation at all to allow it.
And, likewise, they're allowed to block me because I won't enable this shit.
But I'll just click the back button and move on. After, of course, adding their crap and any embedded 3rd party crap to my blocked lists.
How should a site gain the user's trust for JS? (Score:2)
At a minimum allowing every site to run arbitrary code is moronic. Which means I need to know if I care enough about your content and have any trust in you before I allow you to run scripts.
How should a site go about gaining the user's trust? I imagine that one way to gain the user's trust is to offer a subset of functionality that works without any client-side script. But this is impractical for a lot of sites, and UX could suffer severely. For example, in a web application for drawing a picture, there is a workaround for not being able to use JS+SVG or JS+Canvas, but it's painful. The site could use server-side web forms, which allow interaction only through clicking, not dragging, and re-se
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Why I should have a... paint-like "webapp"?
Because you're using a computing platform to which the native version of the online whiteboard has not yet been ported.
ReferenceError: _gaq is not defined (Score:2)
Which is why you unblock what actually makes the site function while cutting out all the pointless junk it tries to load alongside it
Until "what makes the site function" crashes because it raises an exception when querying "the pointless junk". This has happened with an HTML5 Pac-Man game that someone recommended to me in a comment [slashdot.org] to a story about the demise of Flash. Normally I use the tracking protection that Firefox exposes through about:config, and I had to click the back button because the error console showed a ReferenceError: _gaq is not defined when the site failed to properly catch the failure to load Google Analytics. This cau
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Let's not forget about the creepy targeted ads that are mostly useless. After I buy a product, I see ads for it. That's a complete waste of time and bandwidth. The people pushing this crap are idiots, they only want to make a buck at someone else's expense, and there's no question of "ethics"---it's an invasion of privacy and I feel perfectly happy blocking ads and never visiting websites that push such garbage. There are many sites that operate on a "user-supported" basis, where you can choose to pay them
Repeat business (Score:2)
After I buy a product, I see ads for it. That's a complete waste of time and bandwidth.
How is it "a complete waste of time and bandwidth" to attempt to convince you to buy more for your friends and family, or to buy replacements for a consumable item such as food or printer paper?
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OK, say I just bought a pair of shoes. Why would I want a second pair? Why would I buy my spouse the same shoes that fit my feet? The post you replied to does make a valid point: ad companies have little predictive power, and can't guess what you will buy next. Showing you an ad for the same thing usually shows the igno
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When I bought my Nissan Altima, I got Nissan ads out every orifice! How many people casually buy new cars for their friends? Certainly, none of my friends do. :(
I suppose it would make sense to advertise frequently bought items like food, but they push ads for stuff that I buy once every 5 years! WTF?
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The issue for me is not the "everything should be free". I will gladly pay for content I want.
My issue is landing on a site that pays for itself by serving ads and the content is marginal at best but optimized for higher SEO rankings.
Or sites like sourceforge. Easily a site that could probably get covered by a go fund me or some other campaign but instead plaster ads everywhere and have even taken to injecting crap just to get more ads in front of eyeballs.
Or blog pages where there is one blog entry but 1
Re:In other words ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if a site wants a revenue stream, they have two choices: a subscription, or ads. Some sites choose both.
That you want to pay for your site is not my problem. I understand you have costs, but if you think your need for ad revenue means I'm implicitly consenting to the "privacy" policy of the dozen or so sites embedded in your site collecting my data ... too fucking bad.
Sorry, but I don't consent to be tracked and analyzed by the dozens of asshat analytics companies on the internet. If your business model relies on that, that's your problem.
So you can either actively prevent me from reaching your site -- and that's your choice and why I have simply blocked the New York Times for example. Or you can accept that there will be a fraction of people who block your shit. Facebook, for instance, is completely blocked in my browser. It is none of their damned business where I go and what I do. So is Twitter. And DoubleClick. And Scorecard. Basically a whole slew of crap I never consented to being tracked by is totally blocked ... no images, no cookies, no script ... nothing at all.
The real world analogy to this would be as you walk into a store some asshole representative from an ad agency runs up and slaps an RFID tag on you so they know what other stores you go to. And in the real world I'd be forced to beat that person senseless.
So, boo fucking hoo, as long as ads and analytics depends on me being spied on across a bunch of sites, then I will treat them as hostile entities.
Because that's exactly what they are. They're parasites who believe they're entitled to my information.
Want to serve an ad from your own host which is generic and doesn't call out to external entities? I probably won't block it. But I'm sure as hell not allowing these tracking sites access to anything.
Re: In other words ... (Score:2)
"Forced to beat them senseless"
It's weird that you'd brag about your total lack of self-control like this. Or is it just that your burning desire for violent conflict will take any flimsy excuse it can get?
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No, I'm saying that in the physical world if I walked into a store and some marketing asshole physically tried to attach a tracking tag to me I'd beat him senseless, same if he physically shoved an ad in my face. Just like most people would.
And as a follow on, I'm saying "why the hell should we accept this on the internet if we don't accept it in real life?"
It's an intentionally absurd example, because in the real world, nobody from marketing would ever think it is their right to slap a tracking tag on you
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Again, you'd beat a person until they were unconscious for putting a sticker on your arm? Or for holding up an advertisement too close to your face? And you think that this is a natural, normal, not-at-all-excessive way to react?????
You need to work out your anger issues, dude.
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or maybe it's not made to be taken as literally true, but instead used as an instrument to display his utter displeasure at the concept of his person being violated in reality, the way his privacy is violated on the internet? =/
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Wow. I won't even attempt to match this, because gstoddart fscking nailed it.
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But don't you pay a fixed amount per month? Whether the ad exists or not, you pay the same phone+internet monthly bill unless you're a heavy user who uses up every last byte of monthly capacity. But you're right, there should be a balance of how much bandwidth is used for ads and how much for content. Make ads text-based or vector
Using up your whole cap (Score:2)
Whether the ad exists or not, you pay the same phone+internet monthly bill unless you're a heavy user who uses up every last byte of monthly capacity.
A lot of people whose only available home ISPs are cellular or satellite end up being that type of user.
Make ads text-based or vector-graphics based or something else that uses less bandwidth.
Except that the demise of Flash Player, which doesn't work on recent Android and has never worked on iOS, has driven advertisers to pre-render their SWF vector graphics ads to video, which uses more bandwidth.
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"But don't you pay a fixed amount per month?"
My Home Internet is fixed, but slow. My Mobile Internet is by the Minute, as is the case with just about everybody else in the US who doesn't have an "Unlimited" Plan, (With a hidden cap). We are talking about Mobile Ads, aren't we?
Also there is the Time Factor- waiting for God knows what loads, in order to read three paragraphs of News or Opinion. My Time is actually valuable.
"It is stealing if you block ads (consume content without any profit to the service
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Wow, you know a lot about the law, but it's difficult for you to comprehend that people who do work for strangers expect to get paid (with ads in this case). You're either a moron or a thief.
Oh, the laws will be coming soon. No one expected something like adblockers to exist when websites were initially created. Music piracy was ok when it was done via complicated means such as IRC because few people knew the sec
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The world does not owe you free stuff. Don't want ads? Well then, don't visit the site. You're the freeloading commie here, but nice projection.
No, it's not clear at all. You're simply skipping the part of paying (watching/downloading ads) for the service (viewing the website). Are you 10 years old that you don't understand you h
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Theft of what exactly? The ads were removed/blocked, that's all. You're doing with scissors the exact same thing adblocker does with code.
That's like saying, "Blah, blah, blah, it's my computer
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Even if you place them right back? I don't think so. Next you're going to argue placing cans of tomatoes on your cart at the supermarket and then placing them back on the shelf is theft. Try again. BTW, when you pick your copy of the newspaper, you often pick a couple other copies and place them back. Is that theft too?
If you equate removing ads to defacing, then adbloc
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it's not stealing
I feel obligated to support this on technicality, much like the court ruling that said an infringement case couldn't use "steal" or other inaccurate terminology.
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The NYT is paywalled, after a certain number of free articles a month. Which I consider pretty fair.
I'm not 100% sure why you blocked them. You oppose ad blocking, but also paywalls?
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I got tired of seeing the password prompt, and there are other web sites which cross link to them ... since I have no intention of signing up for them or allowing them to set cookies, I've just blocked them.
This way I know to press the back button faster.
I don't "oppose" paywalls, in that it's their right to do it. But I don't give a damn enough to try to read their content either.
NYT is now a non-entity for me. I'm sure they're utterly heart-broken.
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Oh, I remember a little while ago they were pretty annoying. They fixed it a few years ago. If you haven't looked at it in a long time.
Of course, with NoScript, ad blockers, etc. I never know what the web looks like to other people.
Article Makes Good Points (Score:1)
Until the advent of adblockers for mobile devices, browsing the Web on a mobile device was not fun.
I've been considering a proxy-like service that allows a user to proxy through a server that strips out all the bad stuff like ads, beacons, tracking junk. I'd like to set this up and try it with my family and friends to test the viability.
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I've been considering a proxy-like service that allows a user to proxy through a server that strips out all the bad stuff like ads, beacons, tracking junk. I'd like to set this up and try it with my family and friends to test the viability.
That's what we used to do in the bad old days before web browsers included ad blockers.
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iOS 9 lets you run a content blocker for safari. I have ad block installed now. I still see some ads due to ad block but it is better.
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Firefox+AdBlock Plus on Android shoots down the worst at least.
No cost for me.... (Score:3)
I block them all. The biggest advantage for an android phone over all others is that it's easy to blot out all ad's from all networks across all apps.
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Wait ... how do you do that? Is this a rooted device or a normal one?
I've got AdBlock on my tablet, but if there's a way to better block all ads I'd love to know it.
you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS! (Score:5, Interesting)
I sometimes see those "if you like this site, please turn off your ad blocker" banners on sites that I do actually like.
So, a few times, I have turned off the ad blocker, just to see what would happen. The results are always either, one, incredibly intrusive and distracting autoplaying videos playing at random moments, or two, the site just stops working completely because, even on a medium-performance laptop with a business-class data connection, the web browser just can't handle the gigabytes and gigabytes of advertisements that the site is trying to push over the wire.
Maybe if there was a browser that let you opt out of loading, then autoplaying, enormous video files without plugins, I would consider it. But until then, the blocker stays on, thanks.
Re:you could choke a horse with these SAVINGS! (Score:4, Interesting)
Err...no. No I am not going to rotate my device purely in order to see some advert that;s meant to be inside this giant black square that I don't want to see in the first place. I've had that happen quite a lot on the site, and I've still got no idea what's meant to appear because I just close the site when it happens. Meh.
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I ran across something similar recently. They did fancy transparency on the black box so you could still read the site behind it, but it strained the eyes. Then I got an idea: I hit reload and as soon as the page came up I canceled the page load. Everything worked great :)
Not recommended as a general way of browsing, but it might help in a specific instance just to be able to read a web page.
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I forget where it was, but I got a 'Please rotate your device' black window on another site recently. I tried turning my laptop onto its side, but nothing changed.
So many web developers are just retards.
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The advent of HTML5 video is really what is driving this revolt. There is an advertising social contract between the content provider and the reader. For example prime time TV we expect about 15 minutes of ads per hour, for non prime it may go to 20. For fashion mags most of it is ads, for Foreign Affairs there are few ads.
When the social contract is broken, there is no one
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So, your solution is to regulate the shit out of every last detail, and have government approve of everything we do, and we can't do it without government approval.
How about we vote with our wallets? If you want to see the latest click bait "Wardrobe malfunction" article, by all means click it. You get what you deserve.
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No, your "Capitalism at its finest" (sarcasm, I get it) was a swipe at Capitalism. On the other hand you have socialism at its finest, which you'll likely ignore. I'll take Capitalism at its finest over Socialism at its finest. Especially if the worst we can do is SPAM ourselves with click-bait advertisement sites on our cell phones.
Not just a problem for mobile browsers (Score:2, Interesting)
This underscores one of my main reasons for running some ad blockers. Even in the desktop world, not everyone has a quad-core 3GHz i7 machine with 16GB of RAM. I have an older Mac limited to 2GB (and a slower processor). Some sites I visit lock up my machine for many minutes while they try to render 23 flash video ads, 400 pages of java, and a GB of browser chrome. I've just learned to not visit some of those sites any more since they ruin my browsing experience.
And no, I do not feel the need to spend $1500
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And no, I do not feel the need to spend $1500 on a new machine just so advertisers can serve me up more ads faster.
Or you could uninstall Flash and Java. That would be free.
Why uninstall software they might need? Much simpler and more effective to simply refuse the ads.
Of course, what I would really like is an ad-blocker that still "hits" the page (so the owner gets credit), but simply blackholes the image/video instead of displaying it. (I'm firmly in the camp of "my browser does what I tell it to do, not what you tell it to do")
Ads need to go (Score:1)
If other sites adopted the /. style of ads, we'd probably not be complaining that much.
But there's something infuriating when I load up my browser, load up a news page and get the top banner, then nothing as it attempts to load every ad on the face of the net into the page. No, that's not the part that pisses me off, it's the fact that I can click "stop" to stop the page from loading and, low and behold, all of the content that couldn't load is now there, without the ads.
Loading your BS infected ads before
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What about just blocking ads while using a metered service such as data? If it's on Wi-Fi, let them through. Well, as a compromise. Okay, mod me down now.
I sometimes had to browse the web on the Windows PC at work that was used for VPN to customer sites. Some web sites would take thirty seconds or more to load until I installed an ad blocker; then they were almost instant. Most of that time, the status bar was telling me it was 'looking up' some stupid ad site.
So, no, it's not just the data usage, malware and annoyance factor that make ads bad. They're a cancer on the Internet.
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Because the metered service isn't the only cost? It may be the easiest to measure, but it's by no means the only cost.
Metered service at home (Score:2)
What about just blocking ads while using a metered service such as data?
Because some people have metered service at home. In rural areas and parts of Seattle [slashdot.org], the only ISPs faster than the 128 kbps of ISDN are cellular and satellite, which are metered.
Save money, live better (Score:2)
adblock.
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Adblock doesn't block all ads, bribed to let ads thru from Microsoft, Google, Amazon not doing the 1 job it had anymore by default and the advertisers behind it know most people won't change that default setting.
1) That's AdblockPlus, which is made by a different group
2) There's plenty good reasons to allow "acceptable" ads by default, and if you don't like it turn it off.
The way it used to be (Score:1)
Years ago we had laws that came about from unethical ad companies that would robo dial people ten or more times a day and use up all their fax paper pushing dubious products. Basically the law stated that advertising was illegal if the receiver had to pay anything to receive it or it prevented genuine messages from getting through (by using up all the fax paper, or answering machine tape, etc.). This was years before the mobile industry really took off.
Unfortunately in recent times those unethical ad compan
Just look at what has happened to /. (Score:1)
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Is this all merely about how it recently got a little easier for iOS users?
I'm pretty sure that the recent release of iOS was the catalyst for this media attention.
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Because the ads are becoming so intrusive and now they consume so much bandwidth and take sooo long to load that they are interfering way too much with accessing the desired content.
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Because web ads have become so intrusive that pretty much everyone has installed an ad blocker.
The advertising piggies shat in the trough, and now they're whining because we won't go back to feed them any more.
There is no ethical problem with ad blockers (Score:1)
Ethics is not at all concerned with your perceived entitlement to peoples' eyes and internet connections.
YOU are paying for the ADs (Score:1)
Even worse results for in-app mobile ads! (Score:1)