How to speed up the Internet? Duh, speed up the ads

Anyone who manages a website knows that a fraction of a second’s delay in load time will cause a significant drop in traffic. Visitors mentally think of the site the same way they do of the line at a Ross department store: No matter how long it actually takes, the wait is off-putting. So they don’t click a second page, and they may not come back.

But the biggest cause of slowness on most websites isn’t the site’s own HTML, it’s the ads they call in from someone else’s servers. The ads on our own site, for example, take much longer to load than the site itself. Ad servers were what really killed the Internet on the day of Michael Jackson’s death last year.

BuySellAds.com, an online ad marketplace where online advertisers and website publishers buy and sell ads, announced today that it has released what it calls “asynchronous, non-blocking ad code.” That means the ads load separately from the rest of the page, and don’t hold it up.

A blog post at BuySellAds.com credits Yahoo Yslow creator Steve Souders, author of the O’Reilly book High Performance Websites, with the inspiration for their new ad code.

BuySellAds won’t influence the Internet’s speed very much by itself. But as founder Todd Garland writes on his blog, “If the major ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo! Network, AOL Advertising, as well as popular ad serving products such as Google AdManager and OpenX converted their ad code to be non-blocking, the Internet as a whole would become an order of magnitude faster.”

Boston-based BuySellAds.com was founded in February 2008, and is privately funded. Simiilar competitors are Federated Media (which handles most of VentureBeat’s ad sales and delivery) and AdBrite.

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