Charlie Demerjian writing in The Inquirer (no, not that one) advocates a tactic that could help increase online ad banner viewership. Not that his method would guarantee increased response nor be welcomed by site visitors, Demerjian says playing with page load timing, forcing banners to load first followed by the rest of the page, would leave visitors with nothing to view, for a period of time, but ads until the rest of the page was programmed to load. It’s mischievous, it’s wrong and while we’re sure someone’s doing it already, it would require that ad serving companies deliver banners quickly, as some, unfortunately, do not, thereby hanging the entire page until the called ad is finally delivered.
Already we can’t cram existing content through the overworked pipes. We don’t need anything else effectively slowing things down further. Our current bandwidth troubles are akin to today’s fast food-bellied teenaged girls, stuffed unbecomingly into low riders and tight, cropped belly barring tops, their fat bulging outward like a PointRoll FatBoy ad seeking delivery. Not pretty.
