I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience.

I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience. Ironically hiding adverts is a just a side-effect; the improvement comes from speeding up page loads, and cutting down on cpu usage and bandwidth use. (I install Adblock for my mother to stop her seeing scams, but that's another thing entirely.) I've spent the past week optimising How a Car Works for speed (mobile is 55% of our traffic now). The average uncached weight of an article is 1.1 MB, of which 70% is Google Adsense and Facebook (the only two 3rd party scripts I include). I can't trim it any further and it's very frustrating - suggestions welcome btw. Almost the only suggestions that Google's Page Speed tool has left are to minify the scripts that Google and Facebook themselves are serving. I use Adsense because it's easy, pays fine, and the ads seem reasonably relevant. But the weight of crap being downloaded is absurd and I hate the idea of wasting some Kenyan's precious data allowance on an irrelevant advert that might earn me $0.01. In fact, I'm going to use geolocation to not include Adsense in countries where I earn nothing.

Posted by AlexMuir on Jul 30, 2015, 1:28 PM

Tags

• reliability (Marketing)

Related issues

• When ads are inevitably folded into the prompts to the AI, I imagine it'll be fun for a bit to prompt the AI to react with disgust to the...
• My Thoughts on the Current State (Especially Quality Issues) and Future Development of Bun
• This is why I build static astro sites now for marketing and blog type pages.
• os: Setenv leads to SIGSEGV with GODEBUG=netdns=cgo, and other uses of cgo
• [L4D2 - Feature Request] 64-bit Builds of Left 4 Dead 2 (for at least Linux and Windows)
• While I think this is a great piece — especially the part about listening — and it's something we engineers all need to take to heart, I ...