Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

So it looks like about 1/4 of the time spent loading a page these days is spent on the page and the remaining 3/4 are waiting for ad networks. There's got to be an opportunity there.

I previously worked at a digital agency and one of my final projects was building the website for a large TV channel. At one point I had to have a meeting with the ad network to go through the integration.

The technical people involved didn't know anything about how their products worked or the implications of integrating them. No idea if they were blocking or async.

At one point I was trying to understand what, if any, changes I might need to make to handle their ads that did full background take overs. "No no no, it's an expanding mpu" - sure, fine, what does that even mean!?

(Don't get me started on having to swap using js for switching images in the gallery for using individual pages because the onmiture page tracking numbers were the metric that everything was measured by for selling ad space)

/rant

You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.

> You'd think with all the smart people that have put their minds to ads on the internet, there would be lightning fast, targeted ads that actually worked by now.

It's called Facebook Ads, and Google AdWords. Another name for what you seek is "product placement in movies". Yet another is PR.

For instance, looking at the trailer for the new Transporter, one has to wonder how much Audi paid to have that movie made.

And if you look closely at most journalism on the modern web, it is nothing but a thinly veiled ad for a thing.

I've got Google ads on my blog and they add 2.4s to a 4.9s load time. Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling.

Indeed the longest events on the page - as reported by Firefox dev tools - are connections to https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/ which are 0.7 and 0.8s; connection to https://www.google.com/pagead/drt/ui which is 1.3s; and connection to http://fls-eu.amazon-adsystem.com/ is 1.4s.

Meanwhile on a commercial page I manage the second hint on my 94/100 score on Pagespeed is to "leverage browser caching" - all the resources listed, like api.js, are part of Google's analytics. Under minify javascript there are Facebook and Google resources (for Like and +1 buttons).

This is of course not a scientific analysis; instead I say it to illustrate that the smart people at Google and Facebook don't appear to be focussed on this end of things - I'm guessing the minify thing saves them resources, that they minify based on a balance of delivery costs vs. processing costs and that full minification is not worthwhile to them ... I'm just annoyed I can't get a 100/100 pagespeed score without removing Google's ads/analytics from pages!

> Google's own Pagespeed shows me that they [Google] are not doing basic things like caching immutable resources or minifying javascripts - which to me is really baffling.

If you give me a link I can file bugs and follow up with teams. This shouldn't happen and PageSpeed is right to call us out on it.

(The initial loader js you reference on your page does need to have a short cache lifetime so it can be updated, but everything else should be longcached. And everything should be minified.)

What would make things /really/ fast is optimizing an ad based around what brought a person to the page, rather than anything in particular about that person.

In other words, use referers to figure out if they came in based on keywords from a search engine (ads targeted more towards that, but still biased to the page viewed) or otherwise just based on the content of the page.

That's it; the first can be quickly memoised across a set of common terms for a page (and while doing so the faster content of page based results can be served instead).

No more silly tracking, just showing what someone is likely to be interested in at that moment.

I've worked on lots of ad networks and am now building my own. The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers. It's an industry that has lots of shady international players with lots of fraud and politics. Even when there is good code, it's all usually focused on the backend with no thought about the end user experience. Add to that both buyers and salespeople who are clueless about technical details and this is what happens.

> I've worked on lots of ad networks and am now building my own.

Sorry to hear about your failing business model.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/how-ad-blocking-could-...

It's not failing... lots of doom and gloom articles but the industry is bigger and better than ever. It gets a lot of hate (for some well deserved reasons) but digital advertising is not going anywhere anytime soon.

> The sad fact is that most ad companies are not built by top engineers.

This is an interesting thought. Working in a environment close to advertisement (travel recommendation engine), I have a few possible explanations on that.

- First, working in with a product that have no (or close to) added value for end users can be very bothering, and top engineers care about doing useful things.

- Second, to design a fast, simple and honest ad network you must fight your own business/marketing team (because they always want more data, higher click through rate, etc). Since they have most of the power here, they end up hiring more diligent engineers who won't argue about privacy, curated content and other stuff.

- Third, top engineers are working in ad companies, and secretly conspire to make the whole system collapse from the inside.

Ad companies are not typically considered "sexy". This is just an image problem because few industries drop you into such massive scale and engineering challenges from day 1. There is a lot of cool stuff to build.

It's not necessary to get computer science geniuses for this, and frankly I need people who get stuff done rather than trying to save the world through code. But the talent has been subpar because most of the companies outside of the top few (google, facebook, twitter) are smaller and not tech driven. They just pick up whoever can code up some simple server and get an ad on the page. Add in all the shady companies and it gets worse. Optimizing for the user just hasn't been a requirement.

We have a honest and fast ad network, probably the best you'll find. Quick, simple, static ads that are non-intrusive. And we actually perform quite well. It's not somehow at odds with the model, it's just harder... the question is, who's willing to work harder at this?

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