Ads on SE sites are excessively animated, irrelevant, dubious and resource-intensive

Question

SE had very high standards for ads on Stack Overflow, ads were curated, generally static images and well-behaved. I found the stance SE took on acceptable ads admirable, and they certainly left some money on the table by keeping the standards this high.

There are now ads on other sites in the network now, and those are not manually curated. These new ads are really far from the kind of ad allowed on Stack Overflow.

• they often load incredibly slowly (~2-3 seconds after the page itself has loaded)
• they're not relevant to the content of the site
• they contain animations or even full videos, not subtle animations but often quick and distracting flashy animations
• most cause around 5-8% CPU usage on my notebook continuously after being loaded. Some of the more animated ones cause 50% CPU usage while on screen, and they animate indefinitely (screenshot of one example with Chrome task manager visible).
• they make lots of requests (>75) and are often larger in terms of transferred bytes (0.5 - 1 MB) than the actual page content
• they use up a lot of memory, especially since Browsers like Chrome put different sites into different processes. See this example on Arqade of a single ad that uses around 190 MB of RAM
• the topics of the advertisments are sometimes a bit dubious like online gambling
• some users encountered very scammy ads for pseudoscientific or otherwise questionable content (those were removed from circulation after complaints on meta)

A single ad in the sidebar is usually larger in terms of bytes transferred over the network and uses more memory than the entire rest of the page together. I don't even want to know how this looks once multiple ads on a site are enabled.

Which ads you get depends on a lot of factors, so the experience might vary a lot for different users. This is what I saw from Germany in an incognito Chrome session, mostly on Workplace and Arqade refreshing the page a few times. Animated ads were pretty frequent for me, the heavy resource-intensive ones were rather rare.

It't a bit sad to monitor the page load for an SE site in the dev tools network tab where the actual site is heavily optimized and loads in 15 requests, and then there's the waterfall of almost 100 requests for a single ad that take seconds to complete.

These ads certainly don't meet the standards SE set for themselves in the past, ads were supposed to be "excessively considerate, ludicrously on-topic". So either the standards have changed, or the ad providers don't meet the request standard, or both.

Answer 1

Reading this question I decided it would be worth checking if the situation is indeed so bad. Spoiler alert: IT IS.

I tried opening a page on Science&Fiction using Edge. I was prompted with an ads for a bus/pullman service.... nothing I will ever be interested in since I think it was for a country far off where I live.

That said, what is far more worrisome is that apparently the ads quickly caused a full page redirect to a classical scam site "You are user 1000000 and just won an IPAD. Enter your SOUL in the form to claim it".
The link was that of a site called (link posted as a picture to avoid people clicking on it by error while still leaving the info for the staff to check)

I think I don't need to add that having unrelated static ads that add noise on a page is a thing... having actual malevolent malvertising ads that attempt to redirect you to other pages is a far more serious problem... outside of a silly test I am using umatrix and probably will never see the effect of this issue but other may be not so lucky.

---

Update: I am no longer able to reproduce the issue with the redirecting ads. That said, I cannot really tell if that is because the bad ads were removed or just because now I am being served ads from a different provider.

Up to yesterday I saw ads that apparently weren't geo-localized - hence me seeing and advertisement for a bus service for a different country. Today ads composition is pretty different:

• many ads are about SE and are clearly serviced by Google advertising platform
• the rest are serviced by minor ads networks and apparently now the ads I get are specific for my country. They are still animated and still somehow annoying, but so far they didn't seem to engage in redirection attempts... They are still somehow resource intensive, too.

Now I am wondering why there are two different strategies being uses for ads. I assume there is a reason, but the fact that most of the ads are now coming from Google and only a small percentage of them are coming from other minor providers seems almost if we are trying to reduce bad ads by reducing the number of times they are serviced... Wouldn't it be simpler to at least just stick to Google Ads platform (which also has the added benefit of having a built-in feature to report a bad ads)?

---

Update: there are some rumors going on the chat - apparently some users experienced ads that attempted to trick them into downloading .exe files. Sadly, I don't have any more info - will try to update if further reports or pictures of the affected ads become available.
As you may guess if this is true, it would represent a far more critical security issue than anything that has been reported so far.

---

Update: While I couldn't find any proof related to the attempted executable files download, I was able to track down proof that some ads have attempted to use AUDIO. See here for full info.

Answer 2

I'm a user on one of the sites where the experiment is being conducted.

As I understand it, ads on Stack Overflow are curated for both relevance to a technical audience and ad quality, including a "no animation" rule. That's not what's happening in this experiment; I'm seeing ads for all sorts of things that are completely unrelated to the site, almost all of them are animated, and many of the animations are obnoxious (bright things moving around, looping, etc). I reported the first few to SE, but then I realized the magnitude of the problem and stopped trying.

These ads are served by Google. I clicked on the "X" in the corner of one and it took me to an "I don't want to see this ad again" page where I could choose a reason from a list. The options did not include "the ad itself is obnoxious", so I chose "I'm not interested in this product" and thought that would mean I wouldn't see that ad again, but it was back the next day. This was early in the experiment, when I thought we'd be seeing a small number of curated ads. Individually dismissing them all, even if that worked, isn't feasible, I now know.

If Stack Overflow Inc. can make money by running SO-style ads -- curated for both relevance and ad quality -- then I'm all for it. Many of our sites have large-enough communities with clear-enough niches that it makes sense to do it if they can handle the curation. But turning a chunk of real estate over to Google to use as they'd like isn't working; these ads are too invasive. At the very least, we need a "no animation" rule. (Tasteful animation is possible but rare.)

I do want to see the community-chosen ads, so I don't want to just use an ad blocker to suppress everything. Also, even if I suppress the obnoxious ads, having such ads on our sites makes a bad first impression on visitors. At a time when the company is concerned about user attrition, we shouldn't be pushing people away through our advertising choices.

Answer 3

It seems clear that if SE wants to enforce any sort of standards on our ads, no matter what those standards may be, we absolutely cannot trust the ad providers to do so for us. Though we are still in the "experimental" phase, the number of reports of excessive animation and spammy content has been significant enough that we can be sure this will be a continuing issue going forward.

If we are to have outside ads here (which at this point seems pretty certain), then we need to have a way for users to report ad content that does not meet with our standards.

I'm no developer, but I imagine a good way to do this would be to have a frame around every ad with an button to report the ad to SE admins, not just to Google Ads. Depending on what the agreed-upon standards are, reasons for reporting could include:

• Excessive/any animation
• Audio advertisement (haven't seen this, but I certainly wouldn't allow it)
• Large resource drain
• Inappropriate/spammy content
• Off-topic content
• Too large/covers up site content (this may not even be possible)

Answer 4

The single, simplest way to reduce the madness is to shingle the ads.

Think about how the Puffin browser works. It has a web browser running on a Linux server, which ghosts your web pages for you. Suppose you are on an iPad 1 and you try to load a bloated Yelp page full of active content. The Puffin client sends the URL and cookies to the Linux server, which launches an instance of Firefox, renders the page, style sheets, active content etc. — and sends back a simplified HTML4-tier version of the text, with static GIFs or JPEGs where text won't do. This is very low demand for the ancient browser.

So, SE can do the same thing with ads. Be a "man in the middle" like Puffin, having a Firefox engine running on a server, reducing the ad frame to a static JPEG or GIF, or possibly animated GIF where warranted. The ad agency sends you a video? Okay, send along a JPEG of a frame. They send along a Flash exploit? It gets stopped on your server. The ad attempts a takeover? They only get their ad frame sent along. The ad attempts to solve Bitcoins? That only affects server-side and you kill the process after it uses too much CPU.

Ads which work, work. Ads which only work with excessive/abusive behavior find their ads don't get any clicks or conversions on SE, they don't know why, but they stop displaying because there's no revenue there.