←Ad Blockers

There is a lot being made about the new ad blocking features in iOS 9. It’s a nuanced debate, I really liked Marco Arment’s post on the ethics of ad blocking.

Interestingly, it seems most people’s issue with advertisements on the mobile web is speed. Ads on a mobile page are making up more and more of the download time for a mobile page.

My issue with them is more basic. Because mobile pages can be slow to load anyway, I scroll to a piece of content, go to tap it, and it jumps out of the way — only to be replaced by an ad that I tap by accident.

At a purely technical level, this seems to happen because external sites are used to serve the advertising content and is loaded after the content (we all know the apps that tell developers to paste their code before the closing body tag).

My suggestions to advertising providers:

Instead of pasting the code in the HTML, provide SDKs that will inject ads into the content server side. This way the HTML can be rendered as the user will see it, without extra jumping around.

Store the ad content with the site itself

That SDK can also cache advertisements that are shown, so there’s less load time each page refresh.

Use existing analytics

Don’t load a new JS file into the browser to track user behavior when Google Analytics (plus a range of others) is probably already being loaded into the page. Plug in to GA or event Segment.io to track ads. It has the benefit of giving the content provider a view over how their users interact with ads.

These aren’t the easiest technical issues to solve. But the general vibe from Twitter this week has been “speed up the web” not “leave me alone”.