As you have probably heard, the “infidelity” Web site Ashley Madison has been hacked and the personal details of its 33 million users have been dumped on the Internet. Reckoning that it is the kind of story that is made for tabloid news outlets, I logged on to Mail Online, and sure enough, they did it proud.
Mail Online is one of the world’s most popular news Web sites and it is free. However, my browser has a plug-in program called Ghostery, which will scan any Web page you visit and tell you how many “third-party trackers” it has found on it. These are small pieces of code that advertisers and ad-brokers place on pages or in cookies in order to monitor what you are doing on the Web and where you have been before hitting the current page.
When I looked at the Mail Online report, Ghostery found 31 such trackers. Some of them came from familiar names like Google, Amazon and Facebook. Others were placed by outfits I have never heard of, such as Bidswitch, Crimtan and Taboola. These are companies that act as high-speed intermediaries between your browser and firms wanting to place ads on the page you are viewing. And theirs is the industry that pays the bills for the publisher whose “free” content you are perusing.
However, we humans are cussed creatures. It turns out that we loathe and detest online ads and will do almost anything to avoid them. Some of our reasons for behaving thus are rational: Apart from the fact that the whole ad-serving business involves detailed surveillance of our online behavior, there is the reality that serving online ads is like pouring thick treacle into a mechanical clock.
Mozilla software developer Stefan Arentz did a calculation for a page on one well-known tech site, which showed that the actual content of the particular page ran to 8k, whereas the surrounding ads ran to 6MB. Another programmer did a more detailed study of the same page and found that it took more than 30 seconds to load. “In the end,” he found, the page “fetched over 9.5MB across 263 HTTP requests. That’s almost an order of magnitude more data and time than needed for the article itself.”
There is no doubt online advertising is ruining the Web experience for many users. One might put up with downloading 9.5MB of useless “bloat” over a fiber-optic connection, but on a mobile device, where bandwidth is lower and you are paying by the megabyte, it is increasingly annoying.
In a recent experiment, blocking ads and third-party scripts lowered the page-load time on an iPhone from 11 seconds to two.
So it is not surprising that usage of ad-blocking software is on the rise. It has now reached more than 150 million users and is accelerating.
“People are getting pissed off with the huge data loads pages impose without their consent and the idea that they’re being tracked without their consent,” technology journalist Charles Arthur said.
“In this post-Snowden age, the latter particularly bugs people. Fine, I came to your site; record the fact. But you’re watching me wherever I go online? That’s not acceptable,” he said.
It is not, but here is the paradox: We want free stuff online, but we have always been pathologically reluctant to pay for it. We still are. From this reluctance sprang the targeted advertising business model that now drives the Web. And from that came a new realization of what was really going on in our browsers.
This issue is about to get much hotter. Stand by for a serious escalation in the ad-blocking wars — and a search for a more sustainable business model for the Web.
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