Like it or not, advertising banners on the Web aren't going away any time soon. Even if you welcome them, they take up a maddening amount of bandwidth and time by constantly reloading, a characteristic that becomes especially annoying over a home-dialup connection. Fortunately, there's hope: our favorite browser makers could make ad delivery less painful for everyone. But whether or not they will remains to be seen.
The total time you spend downloading ads is a function of how many ads you download, and how large each one is. Size is enough of a problem, with banners running from 8 KB to 15 KB apiece, but the real criminal is that chunk of code from the ad site's server that reloads every time the banner is redrawn.
So why are ad banners reloaded every time you encounter a page you've already seen, when your browser already has a copy cached on your local hard disk? Because advertisers insist on paying per impression - they are billed each time the banner is shown to a user. In order to invoice an advertiser, managers of the host site need to log the number of times an ad is served. With the current technology, individual browsers can't report how many times they have rendered a specific ad banner. So we have to log the number of times the host's server has delivered a given ad.
Normally, the browser would simply fetch an ad it has already displayed from the local hard disk. But to force it to reload each time, you have to convince the browser that it's never seen the ad before.
These reloads can be personally frustrating and they bog down the Web in general. The advertisers don't like them either; the long delays ad reloads cause don't help to build a positive brand image.
Microsoft and Netscape are in a unique position to remove the pox of perpetually reloading ads from the Web once and for all, simply by adding a reporting feature to their browsers. Instead of forcing the browser to revisit a server, the improved browser would count the number of times it displays a cached banner, and then report that information back to the ad server or a designated reporting site. These reports would each be far smaller than even one extra ad-banner reload and would free up substantial bandwidth. Web-site server loads would go down, and as load times decrease, readership may well increase.
Both Microsoft and Netscape have some sort of reporting features planned for their 4.0 browsers. Microsoft's Channel Definition Format (CDF) standard for push-media content sites includes a Tracking Element - a URL to report user behavior to. Netscape points out that its licensed Castanet channel technology already provides a back channel through which information can be passed from client to server.
But a real solution isn't here yet, because standardized reporting software won't come with the 4.0 browsers. If Microsoft and Netscape can agree on a cross-platform standard, cost-per-impression reports will be easy to sell to advertisers, easy to train webmasters and ad-sales staffs on, and easy to support. But needless to say, getting the browser companies to work together is a tall order.
