10 ms·

Why Web Pages Suck

114 points by msabalau 11y ago

notjustanymike 11y ago
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.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  absolutely. calling the devs incompetent because of a bunch of ad network bullshit is not cool. Most of the JS probably comes in directly from the ad system that devs are unable to improve because they are proprietary. I mean just look at scripts like "Add This". The product people want social sharing easily done. Add This gets installed then suddenly the page hangs up an extra 15 seconds loading god-knows-what of 200 legacy social network scripts and trackers.
  - pbh101 11y ago
    Thompson was not saying the devs are incompetent. The dichotomy he made was that either the devs are incompetent or there is something else going on, and then proceeds to delineate what that "something else" is. And while he doesn't explicitly state which he thinks is true, the premise of the article is that it is the latter.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  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.
  - notjustanymike 11y ago
    Agreed - and there have to be ads on the site. The problem is that user experience is always sacrificed for short term profit. The same people who sold a 6 month 300x600 scabies home page takeover (seriously...) wanted to know why our returning user rate was so low. Developers want to build and experience people will return to, while Sales and Product will sacrifice anything for short term gain.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Well it'd be a pretty unusual graph if it did not go to the right.
    - Chinjut 11y ago
      Stop drawing revenue, and the graph _will_ eventually stop going to the right...
  - morgante 11y ago
    > I mean, "the site the developers want to build" will invariably be a site with no ads whatsoever. I think that's shortchanging developers. They know where the money is coming from and if the company has good incentive structures (ie. equity) want to make sure revenue grows as well. Fortunately, developers are also aware of the cost which is associated with every third-party tool included on the page. That's why it's really important to include someone technical in any deal conversation as early as possible, and they need to have the ability to block a deal which would substantially degrade the user experience. They can also weigh different providers by their implementation cost to users, which is crucially important: a sales guy loves to hear "just one line of JS" but I'd much rather use a REST API. The key to getting this sort of control and buy-in is demonstrating to management the fact that page load time has a direct effect on traffic (and thus revenue).
- hibikir 11y ago
  This hits on the big barrier to human collaboration in firms: Role separation that has little to do with company goals. We see a small microcosm of this in software development. Big, lumbering software firms that spent millions of dollars getting very little done end up with teams that have separate DBAs, frontend programmers, backend progrmmers, testers, business analysts, project managers, software architects, build specialists... Lots of jobs, lots of people, and none of them really has value to the company in their mind. In comparison, a small company replaces that entire army with two people, and delivers cheaply and quickly. Only through shared goals we ever get anything complicated done. This is what agile, lean and devOps are really about. Most of the rest is overperscriptive marketing. Focus more on building the right product, than in building the product right.
- lebek 11y ago
  Where is the convincing evidence that user experience improvements (e.g. reduced load times) increase profit more than more ads? Maybe that would persuade sales teams to be more selective.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    The metric is called LTV, lifetime value. The problem is that it takes a while to measure it. It's easy to see that your short-term obnoxious ad campaign brings in more money in an A/B test. It's much harder to figure out that it lowers the LTV over a week or month.
jackgavigan 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    we need way better compression algorithms
    - imgabe 11y ago
      Something with optimal tip-to-tip efficiency
    - jjtheblunt 11y ago
      removed unnecessary unwanted nonsense would, then, compress to 0 bytes...good for all.
  - profinger 11y ago
    This!!!!!!! I can't stand these sites!!!!
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    No. We don't. We're getting to here: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/idiocracy.jpg?w=1224 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/idiocra...
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  This. Corporation will push you content from their sever, including agressive advertisements. It's (sadly) up to the user to filter them on his browser, on the front-end. I manually disable my ad blockers on websites I choose as appropriate. The minute one of those website use an agressive ad that covers the content or a popup, it goes back on the blacklist.
reilly3000 11y ago
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.
Zikes 11y ago
> 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".
tosseraccount 11y ago
[... description of ad bidding ... ] All of this happens on a just-in-time basis I had to chuckle at that.
JoelSutherland 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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-webpagetest/quick-start-quide#TOC-Start-Render https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...:
  - JoelSutherland 11y ago
    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.
shanecleveland 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
    - shanecleveland 11y ago
      Right. Or sustainable until a new way of serving up content is found. Print couldn't adapt to online. Will there be an alternative to online as we know it now?
    - vitd 11y ago
      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.
angst_ridden 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
spankalee 11y ago
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.
Yhippa 11y ago
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.
OopsCriticality 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >just a little too far for DSL Being on the far end of DSL service is pretty bad also. 1.5mbps down isn't fun on the modern web. At that point blocking plugins like flash and running an ad blocker is pretty much mandatory.
kasajian 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
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 11y ago
  ...Not really relevant to this article, which is about ad networks.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    One of the first links from the article: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-websites/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-we...
imgabe 11y ago
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.
- rubicon33 11y ago
  I too would love to know, if that actually works. Does anyone have any data on this? As an engineer, I would push back HEAVILY if an employer asked me to do something like that.
  - krebby 11y ago
    We ran an A/B test at a former employer a few years ago that showed that the popover was somewhere in the range of 1.5x to 2x as effective at getting signups than anywhere else in the page (sidebar, header, footer). I left the company shortly afterwards, but I'd assume the trend doesn't hold and may even reduce engagement long-term. We also cookied visitors to avoid annoying our users.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      I don't know why you'd assume those things except that they annoy you personally so you'd like to think so.
- joshstrange 11y ago
  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 11y ago
byron_fast 11y ago
Divide the bytes by 10 and we are in 1998... The suck level remains the same.
chipotle_coyote 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Have basic income,keep www.gwern.net.The current model isn't the only alternative.
astazangasta 11y ago
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.
sktrdie 11y ago
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.
qwtel 11y ago
> 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.

114 points by msabalau 11y ago

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.

michaelbuddy 11y ago
absolutely. calling the devs incompetent because of a bunch of ad network bullshit is not cool. Most of the JS probably comes in directly from the ad system that devs are unable to improve because they are proprietary. I mean just look at scripts like "Add This". The product people want social sharing easily done. Add This gets installed then suddenly the page hangs up an extra 15 seconds loading god-knows-what of 200 legacy social network scripts and trackers.
- pbh101 11y ago
  Thompson was not saying the devs are incompetent. The dichotomy he made was that either the devs are incompetent or there is something else going on, and then proceeds to delineate what that "something else" is. And while he doesn't explicitly state which he thinks is true, the premise of the article is that it is the latter.
smacktoward 11y ago
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.
- notjustanymike 11y ago
  Agreed - and there have to be ads on the site. The problem is that user experience is always sacrificed for short term profit. The same people who sold a 6 month 300x600 scabies home page takeover (seriously...) wanted to know why our returning user rate was so low. Developers want to build and experience people will return to, while Sales and Product will sacrifice anything for short term gain.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Well it'd be a pretty unusual graph if it did not go to the right.
  - Chinjut 11y ago
    Stop drawing revenue, and the graph _will_ eventually stop going to the right...
- morgante 11y ago
  > I mean, "the site the developers want to build" will invariably be a site with no ads whatsoever. I think that's shortchanging developers. They know where the money is coming from and if the company has good incentive structures (ie. equity) want to make sure revenue grows as well. Fortunately, developers are also aware of the cost which is associated with every third-party tool included on the page. That's why it's really important to include someone technical in any deal conversation as early as possible, and they need to have the ability to block a deal which would substantially degrade the user experience. They can also weigh different providers by their implementation cost to users, which is crucially important: a sales guy loves to hear "just one line of JS" but I'd much rather use a REST API. The key to getting this sort of control and buy-in is demonstrating to management the fact that page load time has a direct effect on traffic (and thus revenue).
hibikir 11y ago
This hits on the big barrier to human collaboration in firms: Role separation that has little to do with company goals. We see a small microcosm of this in software development. Big, lumbering software firms that spent millions of dollars getting very little done end up with teams that have separate DBAs, frontend programmers, backend progrmmers, testers, business analysts, project managers, software architects, build specialists... Lots of jobs, lots of people, and none of them really has value to the company in their mind. In comparison, a small company replaces that entire army with two people, and delivers cheaply and quickly. Only through shared goals we ever get anything complicated done. This is what agile, lean and devOps are really about. Most of the rest is overperscriptive marketing. Focus more on building the right product, than in building the product right.
lebek 11y ago
Where is the convincing evidence that user experience improvements (e.g. reduced load times) increase profit more than more ads? Maybe that would persuade sales teams to be more selective.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  The metric is called LTV, lifetime value. The problem is that it takes a while to measure it. It's easy to see that your short-term obnoxious ad campaign brings in more money in an A/B test. It's much harder to figure out that it lowers the LTV over a week or month.

jackgavigan 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  we need way better compression algorithms
  - imgabe 11y ago
    Something with optimal tip-to-tip efficiency
  - jjtheblunt 11y ago
    removed unnecessary unwanted nonsense would, then, compress to 0 bytes...good for all.
- profinger 11y ago
  This!!!!!!! I can't stand these sites!!!!
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  No. We don't. We're getting to here: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/idiocracy.jpg?w=1224 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/idiocra...
Raphmedia 11y ago
This. Corporation will push you content from their sever, including agressive advertisements. It's (sadly) up to the user to filter them on his browser, on the front-end. I manually disable my ad blockers on websites I choose as appropriate. The minute one of those website use an agressive ad that covers the content or a popup, it goes back on the blacklist.

reilly3000 11y ago

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.

Zikes 11y ago

> 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".

tosseraccount 11y ago

[... description of ad bidding ... ] All of this happens on a just-in-time basis I had to chuckle at that.

JoelSutherland 11y ago

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 11y ago
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-webpagetest/quick-start-quide#TOC-Start-Render https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpag...:
- JoelSutherland 11y ago
  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.

shanecleveland 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - shanecleveland 11y ago
    Right. Or sustainable until a new way of serving up content is found. Print couldn't adapt to online. Will there be an alternative to online as we know it now?
  - vitd 11y ago
    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.

angst_ridden 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

spankalee 11y ago

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.

Yhippa 11y ago

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.

OopsCriticality 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>just a little too far for DSL Being on the far end of DSL service is pretty bad also. 1.5mbps down isn't fun on the modern web. At that point blocking plugins like flash and running an ad blocker is pretty much mandatory.

kasajian 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

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 11y ago
...Not really relevant to this article, which is about ad networks.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  One of the first links from the article: http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-websites/ http://pxlnv.com/linklog/safari-content-blockers-shit-ass-we...

imgabe 11y ago

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.

rubicon33 11y ago
I too would love to know, if that actually works. Does anyone have any data on this? As an engineer, I would push back HEAVILY if an employer asked me to do something like that.
- krebby 11y ago
  We ran an A/B test at a former employer a few years ago that showed that the popover was somewhere in the range of 1.5x to 2x as effective at getting signups than anywhere else in the page (sidebar, header, footer). I left the company shortly afterwards, but I'd assume the trend doesn't hold and may even reduce engagement long-term. We also cookied visitors to avoid annoying our users.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    I don't know why you'd assume those things except that they annoy you personally so you'd like to think so.
joshstrange 11y ago
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 11y ago

byron_fast 11y ago

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

chipotle_coyote 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Have basic income,keep www.gwern.net.The current model isn't the only alternative.

astazangasta 11y ago

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.

sktrdie 11y ago

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.

qwtel 11y ago

> 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.