"Your Frustration is the Product"

Shubham Bose, “The 49MB Web Page”:

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

The whole article is worth a read, as is Daring Fireball's follow-up:

Without an ad-blocking content blocker running, one of the most crazy-making design patterns today is repeating the exact same ad within the same article, every few paragraphs. It’s hard to find a single article on Apple News — a sort of ersatz pidgin version of the web — that does not do this. The exact same ad — 6, 7, 8 times within the same article. How many 30-something blonde white women need hearing aids? It’s insane.

Further:

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

This is, in fact, part of the reason (the other economic) that I ditched WP and this site runs on Grav, now. The overhead for even the most basic WP site is bonkers.


About Me

avatar

Hope you're not expecting one of those cryptic, nonsensical descriptions. Not my style.

I'm Sparks, a happy little lighting designer and (at one time) sound engineer and pyrotechnician. I don't do those jobs much anymore. For my Real Life Job, I'm a concert lighting designer. Sometimes I go on tour with some folks and do their lights, other times I design and let someone else run the show.

I've had a variety of interesting jobs - from hospital IT guy to technical director of a corrupt megachurch in Des Moines, Iowa, where I grew up. I adore live sound and concert lighting, and I never pass up an opportunity to geek out about my line of work. Generally, if it has faders, buttons, LEDs, or is a large and potentially dangerous machine, I like it. I also love children, fireworks, blueberry muffins, reading, messing around with smart home tech and goofing off. I've played the piano since I was too short to reach the pedals, and I'm learning to play the violin. I used to volunteer at a large children's hospital, but then I moved, then I moved again, and now I'd like to do it again where I live. I'm a skeptic who has no practical use for the supernatural or pseudoscientific. I'm a card-carrying member of the International I Hate Sports Club. I keep my laptop screen really, really clean, and if you touch it, I'll kill maim strongly scold you. I believe strongly in human rights and have a strongly deontological bent when it comes to my ethical outlook, and those positions strongly influence my political outlook.

When I'm not on the road, I live in Minnesota. I'd prefer not to be "on the road" anymore.

I'm easy to get along with, so tell me about yourself! If you read anything I've written (and there isn't much) and have a comment, please leave one - I love getting feedback about the stuff I write.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GMU/PA/O d-(++) s: a C++++(++)$ UB(++++) P L+ !E W+++ !N o? K? w+++++ O-- M++ V? PS++ PE-(--) Y++(+) PGP++ t+++(+) 5 X+ R(*) tv b+++>++++ DI++ D G e>+++++ h---(*) r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

SimpleSearch

Archives

Syndicate

Atom 1.0 RSS