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I like to call it the "forbes law": relevance is inversely proportional to the number of ads / trackers on an average article page. Forbes regularly clocks in

by sheetjs 12y ago

I like to call it the "forbes law": relevance is inversely proportional to the number of ads / trackers on an average article page. Forbes regularly clocks in north of 40 on both Ghostery and Disconnect. (Ghostery reports 19, disconnect reports 19 for wired.com)

johnchristopher 12y ago
FWITW, I stopped reading almost anything from wired because the website is excruciatingly slow on low-spec hardware and most of the times articles are just two paragraphs of text surrounded by a gazillion of links* and pictures that are too distracting for my taste. * And I am under the impression that the character count of those unrelated links is higher than the character count of the article itself.
orbifold 12y ago
Why do they need so many different trackers? Do each of the ads use their own tracking mechanism?
- Theodores 12y ago
  Yes! Think of some of the things the ad networks have to do: prevent click fraud, find out if their adverts actually made it above the fold, read their cookies on your computer, report back to base that the advert has been shown, personalise the advert to you, get some affiliate marketing code and actually go to some place if you actually click on the link. To get that advert on your page you would obviously need another tracking service to manage the sale of that ad inventory to whomever the highest bidder is, so you can double up on the tracking codes right away. Then you would need some independent metrics on how many people read the site and what socio-economic background they have, so a third tracker from yet another company is needed. I jest, however, it is a bit like this, and, one really good HN article that needs to be written is an actual analysis of what is really going on with these pages and what all of the tracking does.
  - tripzilch 12y ago
    And to think these sites command their visitor's machines to do a large chunk of this computing for them, by means of javascript code. One day, some kid is going to ask why the machines directing this madness are called "servers", as they are obviously not in a role of servitude ;) Great idea about that article, btw.
- crdb 12y ago
  Many ad networks and affiliates have their own tracker. You can package them all inside a tag manager, they add up quickly.

by sheetjs 12y ago

johnchristopher 12y ago

FWITW, I stopped reading almost anything from wired because the website is excruciatingly slow on low-spec hardware and most of the times articles are just two paragraphs of text surrounded by a gazillion of links* and pictures that are too distracting for my taste. * And I am under the impression that the character count of those unrelated links is higher than the character count of the article itself.

orbifold 12y ago

Why do they need so many different trackers? Do each of the ads use their own tracking mechanism?

Theodores 12y ago
Yes! Think of some of the things the ad networks have to do: prevent click fraud, find out if their adverts actually made it above the fold, read their cookies on your computer, report back to base that the advert has been shown, personalise the advert to you, get some affiliate marketing code and actually go to some place if you actually click on the link. To get that advert on your page you would obviously need another tracking service to manage the sale of that ad inventory to whomever the highest bidder is, so you can double up on the tracking codes right away. Then you would need some independent metrics on how many people read the site and what socio-economic background they have, so a third tracker from yet another company is needed. I jest, however, it is a bit like this, and, one really good HN article that needs to be written is an actual analysis of what is really going on with these pages and what all of the tracking does.
- tripzilch 12y ago
  And to think these sites command their visitor's machines to do a large chunk of this computing for them, by means of javascript code. One day, some kid is going to ask why the machines directing this madness are called "servers", as they are obviously not in a role of servitude ;) Great idea about that article, btw.
crdb 12y ago
Many ad networks and affiliates have their own tracker. You can package them all inside a tag manager, they add up quickly.