We all love ads. I mean, what’s not to like? They’re obtrusive, compete for our attention, distract us, slow down our browsing, sometimes crash our browsers, and generally frustrate us to the point of madness. And can I get everyone to raise the roof for Flash ads? Awww yeah, baby! Adobe in the house! Mo’ crashes, mo’ crashes.

Seriously, advertising is still a scourge of the internet. Usability mogul Jakob Nielsen discovered a long time ago that people pay little, to no attention, to advertising in web pages. You actually have to trick them to look, by making the ads appear to be “a part” of the website. Still companies and budding entrepreneurs pack their website full of banner ads. But is their overzealousness myopic and ultimately fuelled by a “sledgehammer to crack a nut” mentality? I did some digging into the effects adverts have on general load times, performance, and subjective feel.

Enter www.engadget.com (my testcase for this study), a great place for any tech-junky. I subscribe to their RSS feed. Sometimes making a comment or two, but for the most part, I avoid their actual website as it is glutenous and a bear to pull up (especially on my iPhone). The wait times are killers. And apparently I’m not alone (pdf link). So I ran some tests.

First, let’s look at the general size of the home page, with and without advertising.

Less than half the size. Minimizing the number of files reduces HTTP requests. As Yahoo has discovered, browser spend most of their time negotiating requests, compared to actually downloading images and HTML. It is actually much more efficient for a browser to download one 500 KB file, than a hundred 5 KB files. Since the nature of advertising can never make use of CSS sprites (combining into a single file and then adjusting their position using Cascading Style Sheets), they will always clog up your browser.

Now let’s look at DNS lookups. The more lookups that need to be done, the slower the page load. Yahoo has some “best practices” and explain why they have a detrimental affect on page load times.

While DNS lookups spanned across 4 domains, regardless of whether advertisements were blocked, the actual number of hostnames dropped, from 17 to 10.

Finally, page load times went down. It took 8.83 seconds to load the home page, sans banners. That number went up nearly 20% when ads were visible (10.34 seconds). While most people may not see this as a drastic jump, this was done on my PC. A 2.0 GHZ Macbook Pro. Think about devices like the iPhone, or Google’s Nexus One. These machines pull in full featured websites, but don’t have 4 GBs of RAM or processors that can crunch billions of operations without breaking a sweat. Moreover, mobile phones don’t have access to WiFi all the time. Many of us have to make do with 3G service that is not nearly as fast as the DSL and Cable lines provided by our respective ISPs. Regardless, it’s about wait times.

Broadband doesn’t give web developers the right to inflate load times. And let’s not forget about the human spirit. We have this tendency to become spoiled. The faster we get content, the faster we expect it, and the less likely we are to stick around if don’t get what we want. Making load times faster ultimately makes us less willing to sacrifice those speeds. Think about a guy who went to rags from riches. I bet its much harder to lose that wealth than to have never had it!

I agree this article may not be an expansive breakdown on the issue, but there is certainly some food for thought here.

People hate ads, and while bandwidth may not be an issue in the home, it is certainly something to consider when using mobile devices. Just ask AT&T about their predicament and what they feel is the cause. Yet this is just the start. More and more phones are catching up to the iPhone and delivering online content in all its rich, glory. Soon it won’t be just the iPhone that guzzles bandwidth.

Then there is the question of stability and 3rd party plug-ins (viz., Flash). Flash drops any browser on Mac OS X to its knees. Even on Windows, it’s not all that terrific, churning out those CPU cycles to display its meagre videos. So developers that loose Flash ads are real braggarts. As if it wasn’t invasive enough to have ads plastered throughout content, they now animate and degrade system performance and stability.

So what do those banners give you in terms of income? And is it ultimately worth it? It seems I have been making an unconscious decision to steer clear of banner ridden websites. And while I may be a minority, I’m pretty sure that one some level, all visitors have the same sentiments (perhaps choosing not to act on them).