Google DoubleClick goes TITSUP. ENJOY your AD-FREE WORLD!

Lets do this the old fashioned way

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Bye-bye bloat

Back when bandwidth was precious and rare, pages were built to load fast (much time spent leaning out JPEGs to find the balance between acceptable image quality and download speed).

Then broadband and other fat pipes got cheap(er), and it appears that web-page jockeys then threw in any and all gew-gaws into webpages without a care to weighing them before setting them live. Video on news sites is important (and beefy), as are security precautions on banking ones, but the rest of the lard? Nah.*

Now my colleague tells me that with the immense usage of mobile devices, webpages must again be writ lean and mean so that the devices' batteries don't get sucked to 'E' trying to load the latest eyecandy to decorate a news article.

This would be a welcome development, but as a quick "view source" on too many pages will show, that day has not yet arrived. When the text of a news article comprises 20 percent of the page code -- the rest of the words being/doing dawg-knows-what -- we have a problem, Houston.

* I don't begrudge publishers putting up adverts to pay their expenses, but I DO object to huge-ass animation and other files that eat up download time without adding anything useful to their message. If I am not in the market for product XYZ, all the blinking bold font on the planet will not help.

Rant over, carry on.

Visual Noise

Browsing Reg on Debian Sid with stock install, no blockers. Just really *noisy*. I find it hard to concentrate on the text.

How much per subscriber is made with ads? Just wondering.

ps: $ w3m http://www.theregister.co.uk

Well fast. Props for 'skip to content' links and accesibility for screen readers generally.

# apt-get install netsurf

# exit

$ netsurf http://www.theregister.co.uk

Pretty fast as well (Netsurf is a minimal graphical Web browser) with some GIF style ads. Do you make any money off those? (No Javascript)

Between blocking scripts, blocking flash, and blocking pop-ups, I dont see many ads either.

I do miss my old pre ADSL ad blocker though, it would put up a blue box with the word "Ad" in it, to replace every advert it blocked - so you could see you were getting your monies worth.

Probably an EULA clause...

"But the ad giant made no mention of compensation for publishers who lost cash during the outage."

Chances are, just like Gmail etc. users are conned into giving up their personal data by carefully obscured clauses in the EULA, so there is a similar clause for lost profit in the publisher sign-up...

I'm sorry, I use AdBlock too...

... because the way the ad market is arranged ensures that unsuitable, intrusive, dangerous adverts are always going to be served whatever the site owner says.

If El Reg could arrange for JPGs and alt-text for the ads to be shown to be delivered to their servers, then served from theregister.co.uk I'd quite happily enable those. And maybe even read a few.

But the pyramid marketing scam that is the on-line ad business, with successive layers reselling ad contracts, is designed to maximise income and minimise traceability. It's a cesspit, and I don't want it on my PC.

In the meantime, I'd go for an El Reg subscription that meant the site was ad-free. Go on, work out what the revenue-per-commentard is, add a modicum for safety, and see if it would fly.

Fixed ?

I think "re-broken" maybe ...