Thanks Rick. And on a related point … “Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content that was filtered out by ad blockers.
For example: The worst. Boston.com. Seconds to load advertising content: 30.8 seconds. Seconds to load editorial content: 8.1 seconds. Boston.com’s mobile website ads averaged 30 seconds to load on a typical 4G connection, mostly because of large video ads. That’s the equivalent of 32 cents of cell data in ads every time the home page is loaded. The amount of data each website uses can vary. To get these figures, we loaded each home page on an iPhone 6 at least five times over two days and repeated the test with an ad blocker enabled. The difference was easy to spot: many websites loaded faster and felt easier to use. Data is also expensive. We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.” Of course, news websites are supported by online ads, and if enough people block the ads the sites may struggle. Ad blockers can also have technical downsides, sometimes causing websites to load erratically. In one of our tests, one website crashed repeatedly when an ad blocker was turned on. The full list: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html? Cheers, Stephen Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10 From: Rick Welykochy<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2016 8:19 AM To: 'The Link Institute '<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [LINK] Why Brutalism is the hottest trend in web design I had to have a chuckle. Linkers have long commented on and even complained about web bloat. There is a movement afoot to go full circle and return to the days of simple, easy-to-read lightweight sites. Learn more: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/322-web-brutalism-millennial-interests-and-more-1.3602286/why-brutalism-is-the-hottest-trend-in-web-design-1.3602292 or http://tinyurl.com/jmmjtmu "It's easy to get frustrated by bloated websites that are slow to load with their big photos that move and take over the screen, JavaScript pop-ups, giant ads, and autoplay videos. All this has some people longing for a return to old-school websites. And we've been seeing an emerging trend toward stripped down website design." cheers rickw -- -------------- Rick Welykochy An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
