FanGraphs Advertising: Help Us Improve!
Over the past few weeks, we have received a number of complaints about the site being slow or unresponsive, mainly due to various ads that appear on the site.
This is of course, not intentional. At FanGraphs we rely on a combination of advertising, and now membership to support our efforts. It is our goal to have ads that do not hamper the user experience, and may even be of interest to you.
We use a number of advertising networks to provide us with our advertisements, and when there is a rogue ad, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to track down. Ads do not always impact all machines, operating systems, browsers, etc… in the same way, so reproducing errors, and even finding the offending ad can be very tricky.
When we hear about problem ads, we always try and be proactive in getting rid of them. We struggled to track down iOS (iPhone / iPad) App Store redirects for quite a long time (along with much of the publishing industry). This past month, we believe to have finally solved the problem and hope these should no longer be an issue for FanGraphs visitors.
With the current issue, we are going to toggle some advertising switches and we’d like you to tell us if things improved. Generally we only hear if things are broken, but in this case we would like to hear if things are either still broken, or if they have improved.
If today you are still experiencing major issues with FanGraphs on your desktop browser, please post a comment with the browser, how old your machine is, your operating system, and exactly what the problem is. If things have improved, please do the same. You can also fill out the below poll.
Thanks for your help on this!
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Your readers greatly appreciate this effort!
Are there any plans in the works for an updated FanGraphs app for iOS? It was available a few years ago but has since been removed from the store.
At this time, there are no plans for an updated iOS app. However, we are looking into other mobile solutions.
-David
I’ve never really had problems with the site. I’m using Chrome, about a 4 year old Toshiba Qosmio laptop, and Windows 8.
Though the site still seems to make my browser do some work, since someone advised me to disable Flash, the site has been better for me. I can’t comment on whether it’s improved since that change is mainly what helped, but I can advise anyone who sees this comment to disable Flash, or make it require authorization to start. Disabling Flash on your browser might not be a bad idea anyway, as it’s on its way out.
I should have noted in my comment below that running FanGraphs smoothly was my primary reason for disabling Flash. It now runs better but not perfectly.
I don’t know if you’ve changed something again, but since posting this comment, it seems to have gotten way worse. It’s not on every page though, like right now it’s fine, but on the last article I went to, it was terrible, with words appearing multiple seconds after pressing the keys. In addition, the browser icon kept spinning, doing what it does when it is still trying to load something. Unfortunately I don’t know what to check to see what is causing that. What sort of information would be helpful?
Often pages aren’t loading completely for me on Chrome – 2014 Macbook Air.
Content always finishes, but the page may indicate that it is loading indefinitely – saying “connecting” in the bottom left corner or waiting for information from one of the ad providers. This has been happening less frequently, but it did happen to me on the home page just before I wrote this.
I can’t say completely fixed, because the problem was always intermittent for me, but it’s fine today. I’m sitting at my work desktop:
Windows 7 Professional; Dell Precision T5610 (Dual Processor, 24 cores total, 32 GB RAM); Running Chrome Version 49.0.2623.110 m
The laptop never had much of a problem from home.
As of a week ago I was still getting App Store redirects using both Chrome and Safari on an IPhone 6 Plus. I haven’t seen the behavior for iirc a week now so many thanks for that!
The newer mobile ads that show up at the bottom of the page with an easily clickable X are very innocuous.
I have never noticed the site performing particularly poorly on a desktop or laptop.
Thanks again for the attention to user feedback/experiences.
David, I’ve noticed a massive improvement. Speed is faster, total number of requests made is much smaller, and bandwidth consumed dropped by around 85%.
One recommendation that will make the site load faster but also reduce some of your CDN costs: nearly every CSS file, image, and JS dependency seems to be loading from scratch on each page load. If you are able to use ETags or specify a content expiration date, there’s around 60 files that are being reloaded but would otherwise be cached in users’ browsers.
Thank you very much for responding to reader feedback here. This is one of the best places on the web for baseball.
(for reference I’m using Chrome 49.0.2623 on OS X 10.11.3 on a quad-core 2.8 GHz Mac with 16GB RAM for this last test)
No change. I still experience runaway memory usage in IE when visiting Fangraphs to the point that response time deteriorates to the effect of locking up my system. Only when I close down the Fangraphs site does the memory usage plummet to more normal levels and response time return to normal.
HP Compaq Elite 8300, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.40 Ghz, 8 cores total, 8 GB RAM.
Windows 7 Enterprise, Svc Pack 1; 64-bit.
Running IE Version 11.0.9600.18230.
I’m glad you’ve been working on this. I have to confess that it got so bad for me earlier this year I resorted to the nuclear option: I added several of your advertising suppliers to my HOSTS file. These were the ones that insisted on running HTML5 videos (I never install Flash), as those were clearly the performance pigs; I suspect they were coded sloppily (par for the course with many ad networks, alas) and/or were using a codec that doesn’t enjoy hardware acceleration. Whatever the case, they were unacceptably bad citizens and got the knife.
So performance has been good for me for a while, but I have those blank spaces where some of the ads should be to thank. If things are indeed better at your end, I will consider removing those entries from HOSTS, as I do want you to get paid for my page views — but what you’re getting now is still better than the case earlier when I had stopped visiting the site entirely because it made my machine unusable.
I tend to use chrome and fangraphs will crash shockwave/java or the whole browser on several differenet work PCs and a couple older macs at home. It’s pretty consistent and almost laughably annoying. The OS is windows 7 at work and admittedly it’s a old version of chrome that I am blocked from updating. It happens with and without the adblock extension, though I usually don’t have it on for you guys. The mobile site has improved over taking me to the app store every couple minutes.
As a side note, it seriously bums me out that you guys don’t get the funding/money you deserve when there is so much truly terrible and garbage sports writing/’journalism’/commentary out there that you guys are so much better than. I love fangraphs.
I am getting unwanted Apple Store redirects. iPhone 6s, iOS 9.3.1, Safari.
As of when I posted this comment, is this still happening? And if so what is the frequency? Just once? Every page view? We have most advertisers shut off for mobile, and are only running Google ad exchange, which I believe shouldn’t have this issue, so I’d think it’s either an ad that got through and will be taken care of quickly.
The effort is greatly appreciated. I mostly visit FanGraphs from my Android Chrome browser. On occasion, I get a small ads in the middle of the page that overlays the normal content and prevents me from zooming into the close button for easier access. Removing these would greatly improve the experience.
Over the last few weeks Fangraphs was unusable in Chrome — 100% CPU usage, locked up browser tabs, etc. Occasionally I’d get audio playing spontaneously from some random ad as well, which was doubly annoying.
Adding securepubads.g.doubleclick.net to my hosts file fixed the problem. Also removed all your ads, so obviously a shotgun-instead-of-a-scalpel answer, but I didn’t have the time or patience to track down which of the things loading into those iframes was being such a bad citizen.