Catalano on Digital

Have you ever considered the user impact of displaying ads on your websites? I’m not talking about the distraction of seizure-inducing Flash ads. This post is about the impact on page load times that result from incorporating ads from even the largest ad networks.

This morning I surfed over to the Technorati Top Blogs page to see if my blog made the list. I don’t know because the page never loaded. Yeah, that’s right, Firefox kept on chugging away as if my bandwidth connection was reduced to a trickle. The only thing I could see on the page was a Verizon ad served up by DoubleClick. This is Ironic considering I am surfing at home using Verizon!

In the status bar you will see the frustrating words: “Transferring data from m1.2mdn.net…” Just to be 100% certain that it was in fact DoubleClick, I opened the performance monitoring tool Firebug. You will see DoubleClick is indeed the cause. If you are spending tens of thousands per month on hosting and content delivery networks, make sure you design your HTML pages to render before the transmission with your ad network is complete!

So the next time you find yourself excessively waiting for a page to load, look down at the status bar and take note. You will likely find the ad network to be the culprit.

When are interstitial ads OK? Never…?

In general I concur. Interstitials are considered a form of disruptive advertising and have proven a mainstay due to their relatively good performance. Since the concept was ported from television, the interstitial ad has annoyed hundreds of millions of people. If you have ever seen a full page ad displayed between the time you clicked a link and when the intended website was displayed—that’s an interstitial ad.

A few days ago I was on DownloadSquad’s website looking for a browser plug-in. When I clicked over to the del.icio.us blog I was presented with an interstitial advertisement. Most sites such as c|net display these ads upon arrival. DownloadSquad displayed the ad only after they provided value. They found the information I needed and were then awarded with a set of eyeballs as I went out the door. In my mind this difference makes the interstitial ad OK.