A much more significant performance issue with web tracking is usually the absurd amount of JS loaded.
It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.
It's almost impressive how they manage to load so much crap. Just visit a site like mediaite.com, the list of trackers is damn long.
I have a community site I want to build. If it stays small I can probably run it for $20 a month all in and not pester anyone. But I’m still keeping my eye on some of the saner ad networks that use subject matter instead of user tracking to target ads. That might be an option.
Linus tech tips has a video where he gives us a peek into their finances. Among other things the merchandizing arm makes them about a third of their revenue, and no one advertiser is allowed to pay more than that, so they can maintain a degree of objectivity. I think a lot of us don’t want to approach sponsors so we feel sort of stuck with ad networks.
And I’m not much of a materialist but I’m a tool nerd (you possibly don’t need it, but if you’re gonna buy it, get a really good one) so I’m not sure how I’d do merchandizing, since I’m more likely to recommend a brand than have something made for us. That leaves what? Amazon’s “influencer” BS, which is more money for Amazon? Discount codes, which are untargeted consumerism?
For every site I've developed and have been tasked with adding adverts, and every colleague that I have worked with that has done the same:
- Yes, we are aware.
- Yes, we doth protest.
- No, we were not successful.
How demotivating. It was time to start thinking about moving on anyway, but I basically stopped trying to pursue contract renewal at that point. All that work (and uncomfortable meetings) so Google could triple our load time.
You load one ad and they want their own analytics or they try to stuff multiple ads into the same slot so you get multiple analytics.
We clocked one ad at 800Mb loaded once.
The really frustrating thing about this bit is that because it disables optimizations, it potentially impacts sites where they don't actually use tracking.