If you’re on the Internet and you’re seeing ads, you’re doing something wrong. Use a decent browser that supports Ublock Origin or use a PiHole instead.
Advertisement networks are a legitimate security threat because they don’t vet their shit or even properly secure their own damn infrastructure consistently.
Or both. Both is good.
Websites try to aggressively optimize your content for lower bandwidth, so they compress it using lossy algorithms.
Ad networks want to represent the ad content clearly so they are not as aggressive about it.
The irony is sites who care that much about performance kill their own performance by adding these slow ad networks. It’s wild how much ads ruin your load times.
It’s wild how much ads ruin your load times.
And burn through your data cap if you’re poor and/or on a mobile device.
They don’t care about performance, they care about cost.
There are two different customers here. The site wants to serve the absolute minimum required resolution they can get away with before the user goes somewhere else. This saves money on bandwidth and storage. The ad networks customers are the advertisers and they want their ad to be high quality and presented quickly so it’s harder for the network to trim the fat.
There’s only one customer (and you’re not it).
Eh you can pay for YouTube or Netflix. They’ll still try to serve you shit quality and ads If they can get away it. It might be 4k but it’s probably at the lowest bit rate they can get away with while your device which is " powered by AI" makes up some shit to fill in the blanks.
Everyone wins!
Ads are also heavily localized, so their servers are usually close to you.
The real reason is boring: CDN logistics.
This will be a grossly oversimplified explanation. Streaming platforms mirror their files across dozens - sometimes hundreds - of server farms. However, it’s not efficient to mirror everything in every location. For instance, if a YouTube channel has a viewer base that is 99% located in the UK, it wouldn’t make sense to waste the bandwidth to transfer those files and the storage to keep them on servers in the US, in the off-chance an American clicks on that channel’s video. So when you try to play a video that isn’t already cached on your regional server, you have to fetch it from a farther-away server, which results in degraded stream quality as you’re literally accessing a file from a physically farther location. But a larger channel with a more widespread audience is more likely to have viewers in farther regions, so those files are more likely to get mirrored to other server locations.
Ads, however, are smaller files, and are generally going to be locale-specific, so it makes sense to keep those cached in all the local servers. So you never have to reach far to pull an ad, but you may have to reach far to pull the content you actually want to see.
Wut. Quality has absolutely nothing to do with distance to the cdn server. That makes no sense whatsoever.
It absolutely does…
It’s called latency or ping. There’s relays and routers that pass data where it needs to go. Everything in between the request device and the supply device adds to it. Furthermore, data is still a physical object that requires time to travel. The longer the distance, the more time it takes to get where it’s going. That’s simple physics.
It absolutely can. If you are accessing a server that is farther away, it has to traverse more distance on the wire and it takes more routers to pass the packets. The more hops you have, the more latency you have, especially if you get routed through a slower or overly congested link. All of that factors into the tcp window size, which can affect the transcode quality you receive.
How did you come to that conclusion?
When it comes to YouTube, specifically, what’s going on is that it isn’t using your quality settings. So often I see the image quality is shit, I look to see what resolution it’s running at and instead of being on auto or whatever the highest is, it’s literally on the lowest. I have confirmed my settings to be set to always use highest availabile res and it still does this shit.
It’s mostly been explained.
Basically it’s content delivery networks. Caching. That ad, from start to finish, has been queued up and loaded and played for thousands of people near you. This is less frequently the case with some show that you’re streaming.
It’s the same reason that if you were to go watch trending YouTube videos, they will load up a lot faster than if you find some niche YouTube video from 12 years ago that no one’s watched in a decade.
I wonder if youtube buffers the ad in the background as you’re watching a video. That could explain why your actual video buffers but the ad plays just fine.
