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Comment by vivekseth | Hacker News Reader

How would server-side ads improve the user experience?

I have some ideas about what you might mean (improve page load time, prevent content from jumping as ads load), but curious about what you think.

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In case of smaller sites page load time would increase, because they still had to contact an ad network to retrieve the ads and assemble the page with ads on server side.

It would only improve load time for big sites which have their own ad serving and a server farm on the backend to quickly retrieve ads without having to connect to an external ad network.

It should decrease the variance in load times. Several sites I use routinely have page load times in the low seconds for above-the-fold content, with a long-tail of up to minutes for all the ad content to finish loading (causing the page to re-layout throughout).

If the browser is waiting for it then the server would be waiting for it too. The endpoints for adexchanges are the same and wouldn't be any faster just because it's coming from a server instead.

I suppose ads could be cached server-side, but it would probably be more efficient to cache an ad client-side. If ads are personalized few users of a website may see the same ad, but an individual may see the same ad on different websites.

If a smaller site uses and ad network on the server side then ads cannot be cached on the server, because the ad network always serves the highest paying ad at the moment which constantly changes according to the ongoing ad auction and inventory.

That could still happen if the ads are proxied through a local ad server, so that it appears to be coming from the same domain as the content. Only difference is that they wouldn't be able to track you between sites with cookies, though they could use device fingerprinting and it would be harder for you to block.

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