Caution: Don’t Let Ad Serving Affect Usability

I consider myself a very educated Internet user in both personal and professional capacities. Working in the online advertising space has probably made me more aware of this issues related to Internet usability, but I am starting to notice things more frequently.

When I visit espn.com or msnbc.com (there are millions of examples) I have been noiticing that the page content is either delayed or halted in its loading process. When this occurs, I look at the left hand corner of my browser and see the message “waiting for ad.doubleclick.net,” or a similar message related to some ad serving company. I am in the industry and obviously have nothing against ad serving, but I don’t believe that it should ever, in any way, interfere with the usability of a website. Five to ten seconds of delay (or more, when a page quits loading) is an eternity for the finicky web user, and will result in lost traffic and business.

If your site is set up in a way that will not load the content until you get a response from the ad server, then I fear you may have set yourself for some loss of audience. The moral of this story is to be aware of this issue and how it affects your site’s usability and to plan accordingly when designing a site. I would also like to challenge the ad serving networks (I fear I could be wasting my keystrokes on this one) to improve their infrastructure to minimize the delay, as the problem looks to be getting worse as more and more advertising dollars move to the online space.