A week doesn’t go by in the performance marketing world without display making a headline, and more often than not it bubbles up a subject of debate between advertisers, publishers and users. In the latest development, ads clashed with the creative space.
Showing they have had enough of oversized ads considerably slowing down page loading times, it seems that publishers are willing to take a firm stand and refuse to give view guarantees to advertisers serving content-heavy ads on their pages.
This is the approach New York Magazine has undertaken in a bid to force advertisers to stick to data limits, warning them of the consequences in doing so.
Data hogging
As revealed by a study from SecretMedia, looking at 25 top websites including Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times, ads typically make up 9% of a website’s graphics and 55% of the bandwidth, accounting for 54% of the load time.
On average, websites take twice as long to open as they would without advertisements, but in some cases it can be even five times slower.
Quoted in Digiday, Jason Kint, CEO at the industry trade group Digital Content Next said: “You can’t have 10 tracking pixels attached to an ad, and an ad that’s twice the file size of a standard ad, and also expect 100% viewability. That’s an oxymoron.”
The website also revealed it has spoken to another, anonymous source pushing back on advertisers that hog their data. The site was informed that many publishers are now using third-party monitors to solve the issues in relation to ‘heavy’ inventory.
“If ads are not within the specs required, then guarantees are off. They audit us, we audit them,” the source told Digiday.
Publishers are also worried that big ads slowing down the load time might push more people to use ad blockers – tools which have been tipped to cost digital publishers almost £19 billion by 2020.
As ad blockers remain a major issue for the digital ad industry, experts have also advised a focus on improving the targeting and overall quality of ads.