In case you're not sure what any of those are: LCP = Largest Content Paint. Media Images refers to the @media CSS command and the rater guidelines refers to Google's instructions for their page evaluators. Now the hard part... making a decision.
As web vitals become more of a ranking factor something has to give. Which scenario is best?
Scenario #1:
Your site, example.com, is fast, fully optimized and scores 100% on Google's pagespeed report for both mobile and desktop, without ads. One nice large image or video, text and a nice perfect score but you're not getting paid, obviously, this scenario has no ads.
Scenario #2:
Your site, example.com, is still fast, fully optimized and scores 80% on Google's pagespeed report for mobile, still 97% on desktop, with ads. Same site as in #1, a nice image or video and some text, but the 3rd party ads wreck that perfect score. You're getting paid but now you have a core web vitals score in the red for LCP, you see, the ads cause a "total blocking time" increase which gets tacked on to your LCP total time, thus impacting your score.
(to keep this simple assume lazy loading or altering of ad code is not allowed, it's take it all or leave it)
Scenario #3:
Your site, example.com, is still fast, fully optimized and scores a 95% on Google's pagespeed report for mobile, still 97% on desktop, with ads. It's the same as in #2 except an @media css command has removed the nice image/video from mobile devices, and eliminated the total blocking time hit at the same time. You're getting paid, the content is fast, all core web vitals look good but... not as nice a page without the image/video.
Before you can lean on #3 however there's one more thing to condider, the google raters. They are instructed to 'feel' if the page offers a nice experience with 'a good amount of content' and, in my experience, a stripped down version without the image feels a little short on content amount.
People don't read, they skim, and without an image they don't always pick up what a page is about. Is it worth choosing #3 if you get a lower rating from those raters sometimes? 'add an image, a graph, a video etc, etc and make your page better for users' they say elsewhere... but the ads are killing it by causing blocks, adding unused javascript and increasing the LCP total time.
So, which do you pick?
