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LA Times and ads

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Re: LA Times and ads

#21

Post by frozenport »

Mtinie wrote: post #9
smaili wrote: post #7

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day i…

Should be easy enough to confirm. I'll test it out tomorrow and see if they've changed something.

What if it crashes the browser!

Re: LA Times and ads

#22

Post by lobster_johnson »

I develop software used by newspapers. This is a problem with the whole industry. It's amazing how much crap they load.

These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typically I've seen a single newspaper use 3-4 different vendors for the exact same thing, such as analytics. They don't actually use all of them; who knows why they have multiple overlapping ones.

Scripts are often badly written, and it's common to see lots of nonsensical errors spewed to the console. It's very annoying to debug your own stuff when you have that crap loaded, which typically comes from a header/footer combo provided by the customer.

Re: LA Times and ads

#25

Post by NelsonMinar »

smaili wrote: post #7

> That’s a timeline of 30 seconds of page activity about 5 minutes after the article was opened. To be clear, this timeline should be empty. Nothing should be loading. Maybe one short ping, maybe loading one extra ad. Instead the page requested 2000 resources totalling 5 megabytes in 30 seconds. It will keep making those requests as long as I leave the page open. 14 gigabytes a day. It's not quite clear if 14GB/day i…

Hi I'm the author. I did the naive extrapolation. 5 * 2 * 1440 = 14,400. Perhaps this number is not entirely accurate. The fact it is any larger than, say, 10 is the problem.

Re: LA Times and ads

#26

Post by inka »

"Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles."

Well, Adblocker in Chrome seems to be blocking the ads on the page quite well. Some single requests are being logged after the page loads, but nothing as to what the article mentions.

Re: LA Times and ads

#27

Post by amluto »

drawkbox wrote: post #8

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.)

Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

Re: LA Times and ads

#28

Post by gruez »

amluto wrote: post #27
drawkbox wrote: post #8

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

I'd like to a see, or at least think about, a system in which everyone pays for egress and no one pays for ingress. That way the LA Times is welcome to throw as much crap as they want at you without charging you much. (One issue is that egresss is involved in every request. Some UI work would be needed to make this work well.) Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

>Universal egress fees would go a long way to mitigating DDoS, too.

How? By charging the owners of infected machines?

Re: LA Times and ads

#29

Post by morsch »

cobookman wrote: post #16
drawkbox wrote: post #8

This is why data caps are bad. Left open all month that could be 400+ GB of data used on your plan. Ad networks are being subsidized by data caps and personal/business broadband costs. Maybe if ad serving went through the main host and their own bandwidth then maybe ad networks would have a reason to control this abuse of transfer.

Or on the flip side. Data caps will make people care about how much data their site uses. Cause customers will stop using data heavy sites as they have economic insentive not to. Making the web all around faster as no more 10MiB webpages, and making the industry move back to server side rendering.

It's not easy to discover how much data usage a specific site triggers. Android reports data usage per app, if you dig into the right preference panel, but that's not going to tell you anything about specific websites.

I'd like a notification to pop up when the current usage (within, say, a 3 minute window) exceeds my typical usage. That'd make it easier to notice a website started autoplaying a (muted) video, for instance. It's also something that could be done at the operating system level. The operating system could also conceivably show traffic by domain, but that's not ideal; you want traffic by referrer domain, ie. if the LA Times embeds megabytes of images from some random third party server, those should be aggregated under latimes.com and not under some meaningless CDN domain. But the OS probably doesn't have that information.

Of course browser vendors could add more detailed reporting. Say a brief in-browser notification ("Page finished downloading 5 MB.") after initial load is complete and repeating if excessive downloading continues. I guess that could annoying really fast, though. A less annoying alternative would be a special page (e.g. "about:data-usage") that has an overview per page in a user-selectable time range. Maybe link to it from the browser start page.

Re: LA Times and ads

#30

Post by lozaning »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #6
debt wrote: post #3

"They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker and paywall works, preventing me from reading articles." So their ad blocker blocker and their paywall kept you from reading the articles for free? Why don't you just pay them? It's just a shitty thing to do at this point. If they have high quality articles then what would require you to pay them? Do they need to be on…

Why would you reward a website for using dark patterns like autoplaying video ads, popups, 14 bloody GiB of data pushing ads and tracking and bullshit into your browser?

Are any of those really dark patterns? Annoying and shitty... sure. None of the above are meant to trick you, they're just a nuisance.
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