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boston.com pretty pricey for mobile users
By adamg on Thu, 10/01/2015 - 9:29am
The New York Times takes a look at the load time and size of large news Web sites on phones and finds boston.com weighs in as the heaviest, most ad-laden of the sites - so much so that visiting its homepage just once a day for a month would cost a person with a typical 4G data plan $9.50 a month just to download all the ads.
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Comments
Whenever I go to their
Whenever I go to their terrible site on my phone it pops open my apps because it wants me to download some garbage. I don't think this happens with any other site. I now avoid boston.com Glad the NYT called them out on their awfulness.
That frickin' popup crap
I use several ad networks and for, whatever reasons, Google and the others seem unable or unwilling to do anything about these crap app vendors who buy ad spots that include a redirect that sends mobile users to their Apple Store or Google Play pages.
A few months ago, I just stopped running network ads on the mobile version of the site (as opposed to ads I sell myself to local advertisers). I am currently running mobile ads from Amazon, which recently started its own ad network and which, so far (fingers crossed) is not serving up this stuff.
Defender of the Universe
I have had a lot of Flash related crashes on universalhub.com lately. Don't know if anything can be done about that. One would be advised to just not install flash but then there are still sites that require it instead of moving on.
Mac or PC?
Flash on Mac was crippling Safari on me for months this past spring and summer. The issue was 100% Flash's fault and was eventually fixed in the big-picture, but some flash content, especially ads, still give me residual issues. Try a clean uninstall and reinstall.
Mac fix for Flash ads
On a Mac with Safari, you can choose which sites get to run flash and which do not. Go to Settings, then the Security tab. Click on Plugin Settings...
Find Flash in the list and change the default behavior from Always Run to Ask.
Now, when you go to a website, it will ask about Flash. If you say no, then you can still un-block individual elements.
Oh I know
That's what I eventually did as a workaround when the issue was nonstop, but it gets annoying and tedious to do that after a while. I generally prefer Chrome anyway, but use my own device at work and all of my work stuff is tied to Chrome in that user.
I found an easier fix was to
I found an easier fix was to simply uninstall Flash from my Mac. Most of the sites using it were doing so for things I didn't want or don't care about, anyway. Flash was mostly coming to my attention in the form of security updates that I needed to apply right away, because someone discovered yet another exploit. I don't have to deal with any of that, now. The occasional site I come across that still tells me I have a missing plug-in for some content I want to watch, I can find something else for, until they modernize.
What platform and browser?
Long term, Flash just disappears as everybody moves to HTML 5, but that doesn't help you in the short term, obviously.
Flash's death is as slow as the death of Silverlight
Windows 7 on a PC. Mozilla Firefox.
Exploits
Legitimate redirect features and a lack of followthrough on the part of some ad networks are being exploited, TechCrunch has written a few articles about this. Apple tried to fix the original iteration of the issue with iOS 8, but someone figured out a way around it. Now there's a text/iMessage version as well.
Mobile ad-blockers will change the game a bit, but choosing the right one is key because many will let advertisers pay to let their ads be shown anyway.
TL;DR, not much you can do about it as an end-user, and the offenders and those who can stop it have been playing a cat and mouse game with this for years.
Speaking of ads on here
...and I know you don't control them or their content, but just out of curiosity, do you know if there's any particular reason I get ads for Sound Transit? I mean, it is nice to know that one can get from SeaTac Airport to Downtown Seattle for $3 on Link Light Rail, and I most likely would take advantage of that if I was planning on going to Seattle in the near future, but I'm not.
Heh, beats me
I guess the algorithms aren't perfect.
At least they are #1 in something...
:)
They're #1 in #2!
They're #1 in #2!
I wonder if it's worse
than NESN. The latter wouldn't fall into the "Large news site" category, but has seemingly been the king of badvertising as far as local news sites go.
iOS ad blocking should fix much of this, but if you consume a lot of news via social apps, you have to remember to send the page to Safari.
This is not a problem
From a user standpoint, there's never any reason to go there. I paid a rare visit to the site on a desktop computer earlier this morning and was unable to find any content worth my time.
Java
Turn it off.
Could also be totally fraudulent traffic injected by ad networks
For the nerds out there -- there is a great writeup on Medium at this url: https://medium.com/@robleathern/the-mobile-video-ad-lie-938a6de51367
... where they find that MBs and MBs of ad-based network traffic is generated on a mobile site via methods that look like the actual visitor to the mobile site never actually sees. Basically they are inserting fraudulent video plays and ad banners into the mobile session (and charging for the ad placement) but the end user never actually sees the advertisement. The percentage of bandwidth consumed by the fraudulent stuff is insanely high relative to the traffic required to display the real site + real ads.
You know how providers want
You know how providers want to throttle/somehow bill NetFlix and the like for using more bandwidth?
Why the Hell isn't someone proposing to do that to ad companies? Between Ads and Spam a ton of internet provider's bandwidth must be getting chewed up to deliver the junk no one wants.
someone is..
Just saw this article.. a ISP in the Caribbean is doing so.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ISP-Blocks-All-Facebook-Google-Ads-De...
Changes coming
Dan Kennedy has the memo: boston.com vows to fix worst-in-class performance as it moves to WordPress.