And they wonder why people want to use ad blockers!

And they wonder why people want to use ad blockers!

Originally shared by Artem Russakovskii

The insane state of today's advertising. This shit right here is why people despise ads and why ads destroy your browser performance.

It's just one example, but it's so ridiculous, I don't understand how advertising companies can look consumers in the eyes. I want to bring everyone's attention to it and get people talking. Share this post with your circles if it boils your blood too.

Let me show you what I'm talking about.

VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition) http://iab.net/vpaid.

VPAID is basically pure evil. It's a video ad, but its implementation that I'm seeing across all networks that use it (that includes Google and others) is atrocious. It's shocking. It's rude. It's plain disrespectful.

A single ad that shows a single video at a time will generate thousands of HTTP requests and many megabytes of traffic. And in the case I show here, the ad isn't even animated, or showing video! I mean... what in the actual fuck? Usually, though, in the dozens of cases I've examined before, you'd be watching a video in a player, like this http://i.imgur.com/9J9oxz2.png.

I'll let this animated GIF I just took of a single ad with nothing else on the page do the talking. The ad is on the left, the Chrome Dev tools showing the Network tab are on the right.

By the time I finished writing this message, this single ad generated 9002 requests and caused 39MB of data transfer. I left it on for 30 min, and the requests never stopped coming http://i.imgur.com/EvXwupV.png.

It's possible to disable VPAID in AdSense settings (https://www.google.com/adsense/app#main/allowAndBlockAds, then click Ad serving), which I've just done, but many other advertising networks won't let you do this. As a side note, it's also unclear if blocking VPAID in AdSense will also block it in AdX and DFP.

Video ads pound the CPU and are horrible for browser performance. The tab with the ad itself, Flash, and Chrome Dev Tools all eat up CPU cycles until I delete the offender off the page: https://gfycat.com/LeanTimelyFeline.

It's no wonder people are opening tickets like this one: https://github.com/archon810/androidpolice/issues/67. If only advertisers actually cared about speed and ad delivery optimization, consumers wouldn't be revolting by installing ad blockers in droves like they are now. I'm not even talking about malicious redirects and popups - that's a whole other ball game.

Fuck you, VPAID. Seriously, fuck you and whoever created you.