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> Can someone who works on web development for a major publisher please try and explain why such sites take so long to load? 1. The ad/tracking industry seems
by pornel 11y ago
> Can someone who works on web development for a major publisher please try and explain why such sites take so long to load?
1. The ad/tracking industry seems to be incapable of writing JavaScript that is not awful. I don't have insight why that happens, but all the scripts I had to deal with were layers upon layers of document.write, iframes, redirects and copy&pasted JS from the Netscape 4 era. Even when somebody tries to fix it, the best they can do is to add one more layer of scripts on top of the rotting pile.
2. Business deals are made with no consideration of 3rd party's code quality and performance impact. Once the deal is signed the developers are just tasked with integrating all of the crap the 3rd party vendor wants. It's impossible to object: the vendor is not going to rewrite all of their shitty scripts, especially after the deal is already in place. Even when it's really bad, arguing about it just results in endless meetings, conference calls and at best the 3rd party vendor saying they'll think about putting some little tweak in the backlog for some future release.
- thomasfoster96 11y agoGee, sounds like maintains these sites is hell. It also sounds like a huge opportunity if a startup could convince sites they need the fastest ads.
- look_lookatme 11y agoAnd here's the problem with people armchairing publishing, you think the publishers need convincing that they need _faster ads_. It's not the publishers! They all know our sites are slow, but like pornel said they don't have a say in how efficient their partners/advertisers code is. And they aren't going to rip that shit out and go broke just because people complain. Ad block and the browsers sunsetting Flash is slowly forcing the ad tech people to change, but it's not near fast enough. In the meantime publishers revenue suffers and people continue to blame _them_ for the experience. The alternative is they don't do display ads at all and go down the BuzzFeed route, where advertising is indistinguishable from actual content. If you think it's easy to fix with technology, you are more than welcome to try.
- pornel 11y agoSorry, I didn't mean to paint such a bleak picture. There are good and smart people working on these sites, and some newspapers have technically very good code (apart from ads :) There are also lots of very hard constraints. The publishing process is complex and on strict schedules, especially if it's connected to printing of a daily newspaper. There are hundreds of people involved, so upgrading CMS for a newspaper is like changing wheels of a car while it's moving. And on top of that monetization on the web is hard. Users hate paywalls. Nobody wants a mobile app, especially not for overpriced in-app payments. But something needs to bring money, and even getting ad inventory that's higher class than "doctors hate this!!!" is also a very hard work.
- thomasfoster96 11y agoWell, I didn't mean to make it so bleak either, because some sites like the New York Times have quite talented developers!