If you’re going to be in the advertising business, either as a site or as a service that puts ads on sites, at least make sure that the damn server gets the ads on the pages.
Now that our home is served by a Verizon FiOS connection that gives us 20Mb both upstream and down (and a big high five to Verizon for being the first in symmetry as well as speed), it’s getting easier to tell where the bottlenecks occur. And it’s usually not in the pipes. It’s in the ad servers.
Right now this topozone page (one that shows WUMB’s transmitter location on a top map) is holding back on text (specifically, lat/lon info) while the browser says “Transferring data from ad.thewheelof.com…” It’s been a few minutes, and I doubt that the data is coming.
Most sites with ads do a good job. Here’s Weather.com for 02138. Loads fast enough.
But I’ll bet the time that it takes to serve advertising is a tie-breaker for many sites. I still think Technorati is a better live Web search service than Google Blogsearch, but it takes time, even on a fast connection, to serve up all those display ads on Technorati (which bears an income production burden that Google Blogsearch presumably lacks). To see how much faster Technorati is without the display ads, here’s the same search at s.technorati.com.
Here’s a bet. As more people get faster connections, tolerance for time- and space-sucking advertising is going to go down.
And eventually the advertising-pays-for-everything bubble will pop.
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