The Website Obesity Crisis

[Cyborg Girl]

Hey, Sigma and TSC? I think you guys will like this one:

http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

My favorite part:

Either we start buying more stuff, or a much bigger portion of our purchases goes to pay for ads…

Or the bubble is going to burst.

YA THINK?! I mean really, who hasn't looked at all the web-ad startups that are hiring now, and thought, "Gee, it'll suck when this implodes."

[Sigma_Orionis]

This good:

If you look at what the unblocked version pulls in, it’s not just videos and banner ads, but file after file of javascript. Every beacon, tracker and sharing button has its own collection of scripts that it needs to fetch from a third-party server. Each request comes packed with cookies.

More cookies are the last thing your overweight website needs.

These scripts get served from God knows where and are the perfect vector for malware.

Advertisers will tell you it has to be this way, but in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars.

I don’t mean this to offend. I mean it as a job description. An advertiser's job is to convince you to do stuff you would not otherwise do. Their task in talking to web designers is to persuade them that the only way to show ads is by including mountains of third-party cruft and tracking.

The bloat, performance, and security awfulness, they argue, is the price readers pay for free content.