Anyone tracking their advertising footprint/bandwidth?

[tangor]

Wondering if anyone has any percentage of content v ad servicing via third parties to share.

Looking for the actual footprint my site(s) send to the average user to see what they see (and pay for with their ISP subscriptions, etc)

To this end I set up some logging on a FF cache on various machines and phones and did some numbers and was a bit surprised that at times the ads were 20 to 70%! of the total content transmitted! (These sites use adsense)

I would be very interested in what others see in this regard.

Advertising has always been an "add on" to any site, it is NOT content, never has been. I'm also not happy that I can't TRULY control the advertising which appears, regardless of how I configure my account. I can't vet the stuff until it appears, ie., which I say I will accept is not honored by the servicing company. And with this experiment re: site size, I have no doubt that ad blockers might become universal, if nowhere else than the mobile market where every gigabyte is cash out to the user.

Has anyone looked at these ad v content metrics?

[iamlost]

A lot depends on how much content (200 words OR 1200 words with 3-photos, a graph, and a video OR...) and how many ad blocks of what size and type. Despite being 'news' sites some of the big media companies look and behave just as MFA sites.
Toss in that the ad networks do NOT do due diligence verification on ad buyers so that ads are increasingly THE malware vector of choice...
Plus the lag time and content jumping (repetitive flash of poor design!) of third party delivery...

I still offer AdSense on ~10% of pages (down from over 90%) where it's less than 5% of content (yes, I have no short copy). All my affiliate pre-sell and direct ad space pages are (and have always been) separate from content pages except for links plus are blocked in robots.txt and have meta noindex for SE bots that come by anyway.

The gold rush was so lucrative so fast that just about everyone from advertisers and agencies to networks to publishers have become increasingly greedy and lazy; not a good combination.

Advertising has always been an "add on" to any site, it is NOT content, never has been.

Absolutely. Sad that it needs to be said. Again. And again.

[iamlost]

You got me wondering and I went and checked. My advertising/affiliate footprint is ~45% of site pages, ~55% of bandwidth. However, as mentioned, the vast majority is it's own 'content', less than 5% being AdSense on content pages. And the visitor knows they are going to ad/af pages so are nicely prequalified as interested.

Networks and widgets are nice and easy and simple but... :)