Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news
ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw an unprecedented spike in Internet traffic, and then a sloooowww Internet.
Akamai said worldwide Internet traffic was 11 percent higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson’s death was breaking. The traffic slowed news sites and even forced Google to buckle. While everyone is looking at the sites themselves as the primary culprit, Keynote Systems point to a different suspect: ad networks.
Organization with significant news traffic can optimize for spikes, but ad servers and the content they provide are often outside the control of the IT organizations of the news site, according to Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems.
“This is an important distinction, because in some cases, depending upon how a site is constructed or how the Web browser is used, a page may display perfectly fine with a blank area where a third party image should have been shown,” he told Data Center Knowledge. “In other cases, the entire Web page will wait until that last image is downloaded from the third party advertisement service, frustrating the reader.”
Many news sites use advertising networks rather than serving ads from their own servers, but this then ties their site performance to the speed of the ad network’s servers. I would like to be in those conversations between the parties today, and wonder if news sites are contemplating removing third-party ads when spikes hit a certain point. Good for news sites; bad idea for ad networks.
Reader Comments.
Ad networks are such a frequent cause of slow loading. Doesnt take unusual traffic conditions, its an every day problem. Site owners need to monitor ad network performance and construct pages so that they will load without the ads.
I prefer using IFrames over JS for this very reason — however, this causes problems for many contextual ad networks (realtime scraping page) and rich media, like Dart Motif.
Dart Motif offers a reference file to allow ads to ‘jump out of the iframe’, but that doesn’t work with all ad servers (curiously, it doesn’t work with Google Ad Manager, which owns Dart).
We’ve also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As a result my company, Keynote (the same one as mentioned in the post), is coming out with a feature in our Transaction Perspective 9.0 release called “Virtual Pages” which supports grouping components by any definition e.g. domain, path, wildcard,… This will allow a user to monitor a page with the exception of the ad components or alternatively to only monitor the ads on a page.
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