Complete Story
04/27/2017
Wash Post promises all its online ads will load within 2 seconds
The Washington Post wants to make the web faster. In September, the publisher started testing a proprietary tech product called Zeus that speeds up load time and cuts down data-heavy ads on mobile. Buoyed by initial successful results, Zeus is now powering all of the Post’s desktop, mobile and app advertising, claiming that each ad served will load in two seconds or less.
Zeus is part of the 10-person Research, Experimentation and Development (or RED) group that builds ad-tech for the publisher as it addresses industry problems like viewability, fraud and latency using internal resources as opposed to working with tech vendors. With more consumers looking for quick news and growing ad-blocking rates (just last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is considering building an ad-blocking feature into its Chrome browser), speed is increasingly becoming a bigger priority for digital publishers in keeping users within their own sites. Over the past year, the Post has worked to decrease the load times for content and articles while Zeus addresses bulky ad formats like video.
“The web is slow, there’s a lot of latency that comes to how things load across desktop and mobile and no one wants to seem to fix it,” said Jarrod Dicker, head of ad product and technology at The Washington Post. “The biggest complaint all along has been advertising—internally, a lot of newsrooms will blame the advertising part of the business and say, ‘Ads are slow, java script is slow’ and so forth.”
The Post’s technology identifies ads that are too heavy to load and instead serves a promo that doesn’t gobble up data from a consumer’s phone plan.
