The Cost Of Mobile Ads On 50 News Websites

NYT has put together some charts that demonstrate how mobile ads affect the browsing experience on a number of top news sites.

We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers. Not all of the news websites were equal.

Holy crap, that's a lot more than I thought it would be. And people wonder why ads get blocked.

Galvin said:

Holy crap, that's a lot more than I thought it would be. And people wonder why ads get blocked.

Click to expand...

Yeah no shi* .. Boston.com is really hurting their visitors. 300+ extra files just in ad-related components is insane.

I did a test that practically confirms at least one site on that list, Boston.com. In a VM set up for testing software I have a clean pristine untouched version of Firefox ESR 38.3.0 with uBlock (latest version). I hit F12 to bring up the developer tools then clicked the Network tab to watch the time and content loaded:

- withe uBlock totally disabled, 306 requests + 41.28 seconds to load to completion on a 100/10 Cox connection

- with uBlock in place and working and fully updated with all the most common blocking/tracking lists, 68 requests + 4.33 seconds

Geez, I knew it would be different but I figured they might be off by a wee bit. Looks like that article was effectively spot on, wow what a difference.

Did the same test just now with CNN.com:

- uBlock functional: 68 requests + 3.11 seconds

- uBlock disabled: 304 requests + 30.48 seconds

When I looked at the page with uBlock enabled it was content content content, with some white space where some advertising elements had been blocked.

When I looked at the page with uBlock disabled, there were 4 - yes, 4 large banner ads for the TV show "Homeland" which has a season premiere tonight on Showtime and I mean LARGE banner ads all shown in 4 places on the same page.

I mean, I can understand the concept of ads and ad revenue but, that's just plain old fucking insane any way you slice it (personal opinion here, just for the record).

Not surprised at all.

With landline connections that weren't data allowance-starved websites went whole hog on Flash and scripts and spam...the first ubiquitous smartphone-iPhone came along and to the present, websites redid their pages but kept all the excess cruft thinking someone somewhere wants it...not thinkin about pissed customers on data-allowance-starved connections.

I've been using ad blockers since they were released. I have no idea how people browse the web without them.

I would imagine its incredible annoying to have to wait for pages to load, look at massive page sized banners and listed to loud video ads that auto play.

Every year, the no script list gets longer and longer, some websites have well over 30-40 servers for all the unrelated crap, load times begin to get slower and slower, if one stalls out it can hang loading the page. Worst part is if you're on a marginal internet connection, ads and the extra server fluff can mean the difference between browsing a site or not.

One thing I really hate on mobile are those ridiculous social media 'share bars', or login/title bars that are floating. Can't turn them off unless you want to really dig into it, they cover a good portion of the content and just are absolutely irritating.

And gawker has an ever increasing amount of advertising in the form of articles.. I wonder if that research reflects that. Screw that site and its' more recent change to a grey moderation black hole. Comment sections are terrible to interact with, good stuff is often buried in the 'grey hole'. Pictures are blurred, all because some SJWs had hurt feelings with some content. Catering to them is a great way to wreck your website.

Number of scripts needed to load editorial content on the NYT website, 2. Number of other scripts that noscript blocked, 17. Plus another 7 trackers bagged between Ghostery and Privacy Badger.

Number of ads seen on the NYT website after whitelisting site in ABP while maintaining the blockage of non-NYT scripts by Noscript, 0.

Not surprised at all