The weight of online advertising
A couple of articles have been doing the rounds inside my circles over the last couple of weeks: the first is titled “The 49MB Web Page” by Shubham Bose and the other is by Stuart Breckenridge about PC Gamer pages which download gigabytes of data if left alone.
I’ve never had to get really dirty with advertising, but on the few occasions that I have been in meetings with marketing departments, I’ve never gotten the impression that online marketing/advertising people know whether their “campaigns” actually do anything. They just do the things they do because that’s what they’ve always done.
I have testimony! (Kind of.) The application I work with generates and encrypts all URLs for all authenticated users (it was born before cookies were invented). Every link/button/form destination/GET/POST etc. has a unique URL, and a different URL every time a user loads the same page. Anything that attempts to count page visits by URL therefore fails miserably - all you end up with is an infinite list of URLs, all of which have exactly one page visit.
I explained this to the marketing department at one of the larger universities I’ve worked at, and they just didn’t care. They “needed” the tracking code added to the application anyway. It gave them utterly useless data and a lot of it. But they were delighted because, I don’t know, there was a number on a dashboard somewhere that kept going up?
It wasn’t to advertise to customers inside the application but I assume they wanted to track users to try and work out which “campaigns” had led to certain outcomes. It doesn’t take a huge amount of creativity to imagine how that kind of desperation and cluelessness leads to pages that make hundreds of slimy network requests.
