Why Do Ads Make Websites So Slow?

Yesterday was a tough day for good websites. Multiple Giant Bomb employees left after their parent company, Fandom, decided to do a "strategic reset", which traditionally means "getting rid of anything good or human in a media brand and selling off its corpse". Shortly thereafter, Polygon was sold to Valnet, a content farming business best known for their ownership of Collider and Comic Book Research (as well as their terrible labor practices, scummy SEO, and general behavior ranging from the upsetting to the criminal).

I think it's fairly illuminating that it took me significantly longer than it should have to find a link about Polygon's sale that I was comfortable giving traffic to: most of gaming news at this point has been subsumed by content farms or made functionally unusable by firms like G/O Media. It is also troubling that before they murdered a beloved gaming brand I was already thinking about writing about Fandom just because I am so sick of their goddamn websites. I've been reading Malazan: Book of The Fallen for the past few months, a 10-book fantasy series made up entirely of doorstoppers that comes out to over 8,000 pages. I can't recommend the books highly enough but they're the type of book that requires regularly referencing a wiki to remember who the hell a character named Vastly Blank is. Malazan uses Fandom for their wiki, so every time I try to look something up I am confronted with a buggy, unusable mess: a page at least 50% covered in ads and auto-playing videos that crashes on mobile more often than not. It actually prompted me to switch to Brave Browser on mobile, which is probably a net positive in the long run.

It seems to me that it is not unreasonable to want websites that don't suck ass. I think there must be a market for that, and so far ventures risen from the ashes of VC acquisition - websites like Aftermath, Defector, and the endless new Substack or Ghost newsletters from former employees of digital media empires - seem to bear that idea out. So why do companies that acquire digital media brands so often turn them into enshittified, unusable, zombie messes?

There is a technical aspect to this: adtech is a blight on the usability of any website. I don't think I would be quite so annoyed by all these sites if I could actually, you know, read them on my phone without the browser crashing.

One of the unintended consequences of Moore's law has been wholesale indifference on the part of developers to browser performance. JavaScript is, byte-for-byte, three times more expensive than HTML or CSS to load, and the popularity of frameworks like React, Vue, and Svelte along with the Node ecosystem have resulted in a widespread "JavaScript-first" attitude towards web development that tends to be very bad for users on low-end devices or with poor connectivity. This sucks on its own - the web has lost a ton of user share thanks to the lack of emphasis on mobile and low-end performance (I highly recommend checking out Alex Rusell's blog linked above for a deeper explanation of this) - but when you combine it with the performance overhead of adtech it becomes catastrophic.

Let's take a look at the Fandom page for Anomander Rake, one of my favorite characters from Malazan.

First off, this is obviously terrible UX. On page load I can't even see the title of the fucking page, and by my estimation a solid 70% of the page is taken up by ads or popups. I also profiled about 30 seconds of load time on the page using Firefox's built-in profiler:

For those who may not spend a lot of time in the browser's dev tools - this is a lot of activity! Here's this website over a similar timespan, for comparison:

My website loads all its resources on the first visit and pretty much chills for the rest of the time I have the tab open. Fandom, on the other hand, is regularly pinging for new resources, and if you inspect more deeply, 90% of these scripts are ad or cookie-related.

Third-party JavaScript is often thread-blocking, which means the rest of the site can't execute properly until it's done. On top of this, there are hundreds of network requests being made to ad exchanges, Facebook and Google tags and pixels, and poorly-optimized external resources. Add complex programmatic advertising techniques like header bidding into the mix and it's no wonder these websites are so slow. They're literally live-auctioning the ad slot off as you visit the page!

I do find the mechanisms behind enshittification deeply fascinating. Entire million or billion-dollar industries are built off of programmatic advertising. I'll stop here for today but I'd like to do a deeper dive into both the technology and the financial incentives behind it: obviously no one normal actually wants websites to suck this bad, so why do they? Why is venture capital's primary effect on media to suck it dry and then let it die?