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The Verge's web sucks

blog.lmorchard.com

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Re: The Verge's web sucks

#31

Post by insin »

> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it.

I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less.

Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I had open to watch things load.

Same article in a new incognito window with Adblock Plus enabled: 1.5 MB transferred, finished in 16.94s.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/jbscript/status/624535428620791808

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#32

Post by hyperion_ »

tragic wrote: post #29
hyperion_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time seeing the majority of iOS users installing one, this is the same as with most things, if it's not the default, 95% of users won't make use of it. Is even the majority of users of desktop web browsers actually using adblockers yet? Adblock Plus on Firefox shows a bit short of 20 million users, while Adblock on Chrome says 'over 200 million downloads', whatever that means in number of users. These n…

You're probably right against the parent, but in the long term I would expect use of ad blockers to rise, simply because ads are getting observably more bloated and intrusive. Elementary example: the likes of us will get requests from our tech-illiterate friends and relatives - "my internet is broken. It's really slow." And we will install ABP/ublock whatever. This is, of course, assuming that there are no dramatic '…

Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an increase as well?

Maybe you can share your thoughts on why you think it would be any indication that the overall percentage of internet users using ad blockers has gone up?

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#33

Post by justuk »

The great thing about advertising is it funds you no matter if you are famous or not. Bad thing is you have to live under their corporate censorship and all the baggage that goes with using third party sellers (privacy and inefficiency).

To use some of the examples in the article, not everyone can rely on national license fees (BBC), corporate sponsorship (NPR), consistently making a loss (The Guardian), search engines (Mozilla), having a legacy business (CNN) etc.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#34

Post by mdevere »

The Verge has some interesting long-form from time to time but it's subsidised by endless clickbait and empty 'conversation-starter' content.

Not to mention their recent move to close Comments being a cynical strategy to get people using their forums.

Realise that's OT but wanted to get it off my chest.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#35

Post by sudioStudio64 »

danboarder wrote: post #3

Wow. From the article, an example post on the Verge "downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript" and a refresh of the page with things cached still downloaded 8MB again. And key here -- the article HTML content itself was 75k, the rest is ad network Javascript. (apparently over 20 different companies) I don't like tracking scripts either but why can't the ad networks get together and create a shared sc…

Why can't the site just collect some data from the client and forward it to the ad networks on the backend? All of this stuff needs to happen out of band.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#36

Post by tragic »

hyperion_ wrote: post #32
tragic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably right against the parent, but in the long term I would expect use of ad blockers to rise, simply because ads are getting observably more bloated and intrusive. Elementary example: the likes of us will get requests from our tech-illiterate friends and relatives - "my internet is broken. It's really slow." And we will install ABP/ublock whatever. This is, of course, assuming that there are no dramatic '…

Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an in…

That certainly could be it - it's literally the only graph I could pull up at short notice. There are stats around but like browser usage etc they tend to come from this website or that. Based on some other numbers[0], trends seem to be more or less in line with what you'd expect: more blockers installed for visitors to tech-related sites; more installed on Firefox than IE, and Linux than Windows; etc. In that link, you're looking at nearly 10% of impressions blocked as of 3 years ago (which is obviously not the same thing as unique visitors, but I would be surprised if that was not higher than a few years before that).

I'm merely stating a hypothesis here, really - I have in mind how it was that people installed things like the google toolbar to block popups, and then browsers blocked popups by default, and then there were no more popups (OK, not quite, but still). The more irritating something is, the more likely a user will take steps to do something about it.

Time will tell.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... - sorry for the hated Quora ink

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#37

Post by JustSomeNobody »

mr_sturd wrote: post #28

Nilay Patel has the audacity to say that the mobile web sucks [0]. No. It's just your website that sucks, mate. [0] - https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-su...

He blames mobile browsers for at least half the article (I had to stop reading). Sure, mobile browsers may not be great, but web sites these days seem to be written by people who just don't give a shit. Their hipster attitude is ruining people's experience.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#38

Post by JustSomeNobody »

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #35
danboarder wrote: post #3

Wow. From the article, an example post on the Verge "downloaded 12MB - a little over 7MB in that is JavaScript" and a refresh of the page with things cached still downloaded 8MB again. And key here -- the article HTML content itself was 75k, the rest is ad network Javascript. (apparently over 20 different companies) I don't like tracking scripts either but why can't the ad networks get together and create a shared sc…

Why can't the site just collect some data from the client and forward it to the ad networks on the backend? All of this stuff needs to happen out of band.

Because the trend is for the client to bear the burden.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#39

Post by JustSomeNobody »

kryptiskt wrote: post #20
oliyoung wrote: post #2

These guys (ie Verge) are going to have a really really tough time when iOS9 lands https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

They can just do what everybody else does, replace the site with "USE THE VERGE APP!!1!", and show the ads there instead. Which is a good reason for Apple to push adblocking in the browser.

This is Apple's goal. They want people to write apps and show ads through Apple's own ad network.

Re: The Verge's web sucks

#40

Post by christop »

insin wrote: post #31

> We keep things like Adblock Plus at arm's length for plausible deniability - but everyone I know uses it. I wish this had been included in the main body of this post, with some metrics; everyone you know uses it because it makes the web suck so much less. Loading The Verge's article in a Chrome incognito window: 19.6 MB transferred, finished in 41.9 s, huge ad covering the entire page above the developer console I…

I guess that can be reduced a lot if not only adverts, but all the tracking scripts are blocked.

I just tested this with uMatrix where I use pretty much the defaults, but allow the two CDNs for theverge.com.

Ended up with 600kB downloaded and 1.37s load time on an empty cache.

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