Two words
Ad blocker.
Seriously, are there any FireFox and Chrome users out there who haven't yet installed the AdBlockPlus extension? I'm sure that even IE provides some kind of mechanism for blocking ads too.
If you’re watching a free-to-air television program, your direct financial input to the communications channel between you and the TV station is effectively zero. Whatever it costs the broadcaster to use its spectrum is paid by the broadcaster. When an advertiser yells out the latest TV, computer and carpet specials, it’s …
Between noscript, flashblock and adblock there's pretty much no chance of a (huge) ad getting to my screen. I don't block all ads - but serve up one that annoys me and the ad vendor gets added to the Blackhole list.
(hint - Flash ads, esp with sound, going to get dumped! Google style text block with links - love'em!)
He says: Australia has a great opportunity to start showing the world what we can do.
Too true. We would be well on the way to having this highest installation rates of ad blockers on the planet. We already pay more than more most for our bytes, and they are delivered slow, so that would seem inevitable.
Given they already state that the sites that host them push back for smaller ads so that pages load faster (for Google robots especially) I foresee them getting told to piss off.
As for...
"He also said that since the average Web page size is 1.3 MB, the increase was trivial overall."
That is testament to the amount of shit on the internet these days. I just looked at a Reg page and it was 292kb uncompressed. Mind you I do ad-block. Sorry, but over the years I've just got sick of waiting for pages to render because some shite couldn't be picked up off of an ad-server.
Australia doesn't have the virtually unlimited download options that are common in the USA and Europe, so these can quickly penalise the innocent who are not aware of Flash blockers and the like. The internet is not only outrageously slow in Australia, but outrageously expensive per MB.
These users also get hit hard by large updates from Microsoft, Apple and Adobe (which can't be easily consolidated across multiple machines in a single home).
I bet the folks coming up with these ideas are all city-based with access to 100MB connections. I'm guessing that there are plenty of Aussies too for whom distance from the exchange is all-important. They should be working out the impact of this kind of decision on those with the slowest links.
Although, as pointed out already, adblocking means that the more dramatic the ad, the more likely it is to be hidden anyway. Simple text-based ads often get through when others would be suppressed.
"...would lead to bigger bandwidth bills for media owners and higher advertising prices."
This seems to me a poor reason to be concerned.
Most -- almost all -- advertising is either offensively obsequious, written by and for the mentally handicapped, or both. It makes a lot more sense to be concerned about all the brain cells that are murdered every time an advertisement is displayed.
I am not bothered by non animated banner ads and have been known to visit the sites (specialist forums). But a few years ago I was forced to start blocking them.
1) Popup adverts covering the site - kill them.
2) Huge ads taking up too much screen.
3) Animated ads - as bad as animated TV channel logos - evil.
4) Ads with sound - **** off!
5) Sites where we already pay - looking directly at Ebay here.
And there you are, a lot of web users were happy with them until you started assulting us with them. We knew they paid for the site but we do not want to be assulted.
HINT: TV ads if not watching a recording, due to advert volume I do not turn down the volume I MUTE.
Make the advert mostly black, stick it in the background of the site and suppress the mouse pointer from changing, as it hovers over the ad.
After all, causing an irritated user to inadvertently click through to a website they didn't want to go to, had no positive interest in before they went there, and which they are likely to have an extremely adverse response to, in the future, is almost as good as selling them a phone, isn't it?
"Make the advert mostly black, stick it in the background of the site and suppress the mouse pointer from changing, as it hovers over the ad."
Ah, it's not just me who frequently falls foul of that when I click focus back into my browser, careful to always click into the blank space outside the content area...
Steve.
"He also said that since the average Web page size is 1.3 MB, the increase was trivial overall."
1.3Mb? Really? What have they got on those pages? Huge ads?
Embedded video? A user might expect a bit of buffering before a video plays, but surely the page it is presented on should appear almost instantly.
A page of content should be around 10K. That's why adverts are so annoying because they ARE a significant part of the page already. And they want to make it worse?
Maybe Firefox 4 should ship with AdBlock Pro built in.
I live in Australia, but I have the usual impatiance of the general world populace regarding web pages, if they take more than a few seconds to load on my broadband connection I close them. I start loading a vid from a news site and an add stat playing first, I close it etc etc. All this means is that people will start using adblock etc more, not that they will see more, and more beautiful, ads.
Rubbish
In order to make a move like this, my interpretation is that advertisers don't think they're getting the results from on-line advertising.
Bigger, blinger, usually means better in the advertising world, after all.
The thing at the back of my mind is that if advertisers lose their perception of value from internet advertising, (and lets face it, I can't understand how they have believed there is value in Internet advertising for so long, given that even before web add blockers, people like me were programming the servers in to our broadband router filter tables) then this could have an impact on all the free Internet jollies that go on.
They've an area the size of France & Germany* under water.
They've been told what they are and aren't allowed to see on the internet.
They've lost the Ashes, losing 3 tests by an innings
Now they're going to have bloated "innovative, engaging and truly fabulous creative" content from advertisers foisted upon them
I for one will be adopting an Ozzie today.
* Source BBC
Beer, this one's me.
It's not all bad for the Aussies, they have won the one day series.
Mind you, that is a series of no consequence whatever and they have racked up a large number of injuries in so doing right before a one day series that does matter.
As you were then. Coat please.
....is 1.3mb? Is it? I show El Reg at around 260kb, YouTube around 500kb and b3ta waddles in at around 1.5mb. And 1.3mb is the *average*?
Even if that were true, your browser does not download the entire page every time (unless you force it), it only downloads the changes. So after the first 1.3mb spurt into your cache, the next updates will be a few kb here and there, making 100kb a significant overhead.
Anyway, the average appears to be nearer 320kb (http://code.google.com/speed/articles/web-metrics.html) and probably around the 500kb mark (http://techattitude.com/internet/average-webpage-size-increased-five-folds-since-2003/). So that ad size increase of 60kb just bloated your page size by about 10=>20%. Nice.
I think that Mr. McDonald is full of a metric-fuck-tonne of crap.
Run something like Privoxy to kill ads at source. And if that is too much hassle, use NoScript, Flashblock and AdBlock to kill them one the page. If they had not made their ads so annoying, I would not feel compelled to block them. They only have themselves to blame.
What kind of advertising works? Getting the product right. I don't recall ever seeing an advert for Edimax, but their cards were reported to work well. I plugged one it, it worked perfectly. Then Edimax added offical support for Linux. I will now go to Edimax first when I need network trickery. Why? Ronseal principle. No bullshit, no bling, just get the effin' job done.