A spot-on description of how targetted advertising works …or rather, how it doesn’t.
They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.
Contextual advertising works. Targeted advertising? Who knows!
Let’s see all that proof that 400+ requests for thirsty ass always-running JavaScript is just what we have to do to make advertising good.
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.
I agree completely. And AMP is not the answer:
Given the assumption that any additional bandwidth offered to web developers will immediately be consumed, there seems to be just one possible solution, which is to reduce the amount of bytes that are transmitted. For some bizarre reason, this hasn’t happened on the main web, because it somehow makes more sense to create an exact copy of every page on their site that is expressly designed for speed. Welcome back, WAP — except, for some reason, this mobile-centric copy is entirely dependent on yet more bytes. This is the dumbfoundingly dumb premise of AMP.
Harry describes the process he uses for auditing the effects of third-party scripts. He uses the excellent Request Map which was mentioned multiple times at the Delta V conference.
The focus here is on performance, but these tools are equally useful for shining a light on just how bad the situation is with online surveillance and tracking.
When someone’s web browsing experience can be so drastically improved by simply switching off JavaScript, you know it’s time for an intervention with web developers.
This is our fault. Client-side JavaScript gave us enormous power and we abused that power.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising.
JavaScript and the observer effect.
Verging on the ridiculous.
A presentation at An Event Apart Boston 2018.