Here’s another reason to hate those ad-laden web pages: they’ve slowed the web to a crawl.
These days, most ads on a page are served from different sources than the content of the page. This means that one web page may require fetching elements from a dozen servers, all in different locations. And in many browsers, it causes a problem: if one of those dozen doesn’t respond quickly enough (or at all) you are stuck with a blank screen until it does. The browser waits to draw the page until all the content has arrived.
This happens a lot with WashingtonPost.com, which has on average 5 ads per page. The text of the page loads quickly, then one must wait.. and wait… for the ads to load before you can read the whole article. (Of course, they’ve now split up articles onto several pages so that you’re forced to wait again and again to read the whole thing.)
