Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

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I completely understand why people use Adblock - it improves the user experience. Ironically hiding adverts is a just a side-effect; the improvement comes from speeding up page loads, and cutting down on cpu usage and bandwidth use. (I install Adblock for my mother to stop her seeing scams, but that's another thing entirely.)

I've spent the past week optimising How a Car Works for speed (mobile is 55% of our traffic now).

The average uncached weight of an article is 1.1 MB, of which 70% is Google Adsense and Facebook (the only two 3rd party scripts I include). I can't trim it any further and it's very frustrating - suggestions welcome btw.

Almost the only suggestions that Google's Page Speed tool has left are to minify the scripts that Google and Facebook themselves are serving.

I use Adsense because it's easy, pays fine, and the ads seem reasonably relevant. But the weight of crap being downloaded is absurd and I hate the idea of wasting some Kenyan's precious data allowance on an irrelevant advert that might earn me $0.01.

In fact, I'm going to use geolocation to not include Adsense in countries where I earn nothing.

One optimization I do often - don't load the FB scripts until someone actually hovers over an FB like button or share box. 99.9% of the time, they never do. In the meantime, just mock the look of the button. We even mocked the like counts et al by polling FB's API from teh server.

Related: Heise's Shariff JS. https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

Of course, there is no hover on mobile, so you are probably optimizing traffic where it is not so critical.

What if they click the button before the script loads?

If the buttons are rendered on the client, they won't show up at all before the script loads.

That's very considerate of you, thank you. I just clicked an ad on your page as a reward :).

I don't think people are really bothered that there are ads - everyone learns at some point that under current system, people need to earn money to live and websites cost money to keep them up. The problem is with a) the amount of ads, b) obnoxiousness of them, and c) that quite a lot are actually dishonest, annoying and downright malicious. It's because of those people started using ad blockers. The Internet really looks much, much better without all that crap. I'm pretty sure for most the resource use is a secondary consideration to the amount of frustration an ad-laden site can generate.

I don't mind ads. I hate the tracking. I either want a market solution to it, or, failing that, I want it outlawed.

>I can't trim it any further

It seems pretty obvious that you could reduce your page size by 70% by simply removing Google and Facebook scripts.

So obvious that they almost certainly considered it...

It's my (located in USA) precious data allowance, too. At the price I pay for mobile data - my plan comes out to $0.025/MB - I would not be at all surprised to discover that I'm paying more to be advertised to than you're being paid to carry the ad.

Thats one of the reasons I like uBlock origin- supposedly, it says the ad was displayed/clicked on a webpage, which means I don't deal with ads and websites don't deal with money loss.

No it doesn't. This is some bizarre myth that keeps being perpetuated.[0]

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Does-uBlock-block-ads...

The problem is that even IF it did do this, it wouldn't help publishers. In fact it would probably hurt publishers because ad performance would take a hit. This would lower ad pay rates and possibly even sell-through.

uBlock doesn't click ads in the background.

That would be https://dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/

> it says the ad was displayed/clicked on a webpage

Where exactly does it say this?

Isn't it reasonable to assume most users already have a CDN version of adsense and facebook cached since 90% of all websites use it?

Try CloudFlare? That should get the page weight down a bit while costing you nothing.

He's not concerned about his bandwidth costs, but about the bandwidth costs (in both money and time) to the users.

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