The Cost of Mobile Ads on News Websites | Hacker News Reader

The Cost of Mobile Ads on News Websites

nytimes.com

95 pointsdekayed20 comments

This is what annoys me about the supposed moral hazard around ad blocking. Content sites, particularly news providers have no respect for their users and just pile layer upon layer of crap.

At one point the huge org I worked for blocked all ads for local newspapers. Not because we hate ads, but because they were frequently used to deliver malware, and in one case malware suspected to be targeted at our organization.

We called the media outlet and even offered to help, but were rebuffed. So screw them I say.

Fine print at the bottom:

> The data does not account for text compression, which reduces the size of text files.

I feel like this hugely downweights the differences, HTML and JS compress very well so this means images and other Ad data really take a huge chunk of the bandwidth.

Pretty terrible name for the article. It should be "The Bandwidth Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites"

Yeah, I was excited to see pricing comparisons. Still interesting though.

They do show the real dollar cost as well. I assume this is if you had to pay for each MB of data usage though.

I think what piratebroadcast meant is that the title of the article makes it sound like it will be about what advertisers have to pay to advertise on 50 different websites

That's what I was expecting when I clicked on the link.

30 seconds of loading just for ads?! Come on, this is ridiculous. I know they are supported by ads, but this excessive advertising is not the way to do it. There must be a better way.

I agree. Some famous website has even longer loading time. See the discuss on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9940202

Yeah, recently I stopped going there entirely. Mostly because of their heavy website, but also because of their clickbaity non-stories.

I found the comparisons wanting, as they only estimated the delays caused by the downloading of the data. They apparently made no attempt to measure the performance impact of actually running all the trackers/ads in the browser. From results posted elsewhere, I believe this is also a meaningful amount of time for many sites.

So the net improvement of an ad blocker may be even higher than stated here.

This is what really annoys me about not being able to block ads on Android. I am really hoping content blockers on iOS will convince Google to do it as well. 30 seconds of ads for an 8 second page is unacceptable. Not only that but the potential for malware with no protection is huge. Who knows what those ads are able to send back in tracking, or inject into the phone.

>not being able to block ads on Android

Not only are there multiple browsers that block ads on android (including firefox, Adblock Browser for Android, nochromo). There are also non-root apps that block ads in other apps by using an on-device proxy (ad blockplus, adguard). There are also very powerful root apps that remove ads from browsers and apps (such a minminguard, which eliminates app ads entirely so that it doesn't even leave behind an empty UI box).

Right, I definitely phrased it badly. Content blockers on iOS are very different than using a specific browser on Android though. Proxying though abp and adguard has been a pain to set up in my experience. Though I have not done so recently. I was unaware of minminguard, and will check it out later today, but again not a simple OS level solution like content blockers.

Android Firefox + uBlock, no root required.

I expect big sites to start serving ads in a way that appears to be organic and would be hard to block. As long as people serve ads direct from ad network domains blocks is fairly easy. If the content looks like part of an article then it's much more difficult to differentiate.

TV tried this - remember Bones one season how every episode she'd demonstrate to Booth how her iPhone worked? Or on Elementary how Sherlock would flip open his Surface in the john and send an email, while the camera lovingly watched over his shoulder?

Viewers rebel, ratings drop, and directors quickly ban such perversions of their art. Its not sustainable. Will you read articles on HN that are half ads? Neither will I.

Reason why I started using Adblock is because of NFL.com

If you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play you will end up watching a commercial first. Super annoying !!!!

Classic poem with a modern twist..

First they came for the computer game developers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a computer game developer.

Then they came for the Musicians, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Musician.

Then they came for the the film makers, and I did not speak out—Because I did not make movies.

Then they came for news—and there was no one left to speak for me.

You've got it backwards: The travesty of degrading things with shitty advertisements was early in the News sector.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com