…and this is a 
Yes! There are new ads here!
Category: Administrative
Posted on: March 20, 2007 12:38 PM, by PZ Myers
In order to help pay for the tremendous amounts of bandwidth Pharyngula and its Sciblings are sucking off the internet, there are new video ads inserted below the first article on each page. They are a kind of visual noise, but they aren't supposed to slow down access—they should only load significant quantities of data if you click on them. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, leave a message here and I'll pass the word on to the tech people.
In case you've got got ad blocking software installed, I'll mention that it is a movie for Dupont fire retardants that features a very chipper, slender blonde woman. Dupont saves lives with chemical, materials, and energy solutions. (That was much less painful than a fancy video ad, wasn't it? I know, I'm not as pretty as Amanda Congdon … but I'm more sciencey).
Comments
I get multiple "Internet Explorer cannot download ." popup errors, using FeedReader. I've got three right now waiting for attention.
Sorry, PZ, but the ads are a significant slowdown and source of errors. Love ya like a squid, but they ruin the Pharyngula experience for me.
Posted by: CaroCogitatus | March 20, 2007 1:15 PM
Hey, I like the "Shelter from the Storm" one. On the poster frame it looks like she's using the power of her mind to lift the roof off a building.
(Sorry. I just got done watching an old video of James Randi busting a self-procliamed psychic's claims of psychokinesis.)
Posted by: David Livesay | March 20, 2007 1:17 PM
She's a cutie. And I love her "I *heart* pirates" t-shirt.
Posted by: Paul D | March 20, 2007 1:20 PM
I had to disable Java in order to keep Opera from crashing within a few seconds every time I reloaded a Scienceblogs page. That seems to have solved the problem, but I'm not seeing the ads, either. Ah well...
Posted by: Azkyroth | March 20, 2007 1:22 PM
I'm not sure whether the ads are a big bandwidth hog or not, but they do seem to be quite the CPU hog - at least if you browse like I do: a laptop using its most battery-saving mode with lots of windows and tabs open at once.
While I appreciate "Better Things for Better Living ... Through Chemistry" - perhaps better than most - I've gotta say: Sorry, DuPont. You're getting blocked.
Posted by: Rick @ shrimp and grits | March 20, 2007 1:22 PM
DuPont? I thought that was Clark Foam's slogan. ;-)
Posted by: David Livesay | March 20, 2007 1:27 PM
your video certainly are power intensive, don't know why but my computer (or browser really is slowing down on it).
Do you mind me asking what company is proposing those kinda of advertisement on website?
thanks
______________________________
money is being made right now at:
http://www.typerswanted.blogspot.com/
______________________________
Posted by: matt | March 20, 2007 1:28 PM
By the way, I'm having no trouble at all with the ads. They just sit there unless I'm bored enough to click on them. It's not affecting my load time at all. (Using Safari on Mac OS X.)
Aside from some momentary befuddlement about what the video had to do with the article, I'm suffering no ill effects.
Posted by: David Livesay | March 20, 2007 1:30 PM
Eh, but they do.
Internet Explorer 7 for Windows takes much longer to load than usual. Safari for Mac (10.3) simply crashes "unexpectedly" unless I cancel the loading of the page within a not very broad time window. And this on every page -- clicking back and forth between the main page and the article pages requires I hit that time window every time.
And no, the woman is not pretty (unless, of course, compared to the Coultergeist).
BTW, last time I checked, Dupont was among the more evil of huge corporations... it's been a couple of years, though.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 20, 2007 1:34 PM
Ads. Booooo! These Seed science sites are getting super ad heavy.
What do I have to set in my browser to get rid of them?
Posted by: CalGeorge | March 20, 2007 1:39 PM
I actually watched the ad to support Science Blogs.
I don't even have a house or live in a prime hurricane target area.
Not a big deal. Woudn't mind a kevlar lined wine cellar though.
Posted by: Steve_C | March 20, 2007 1:43 PM
I'm using Internet Explorer on Windows XP, and everything seems fine. The current ads seem quite well-behaved. Do you remember the moving tornado ad? It makes me laugh now but it did get a few people riled up.
Posted by: Paguroidea | March 20, 2007 1:43 PM
They are a kind of visual noise...
Don't belittle the impact of visual clutter. Having something dancing and flashing just at the edge of your vision makes it very hard to read static text. I've gone so far as to actually leave sites if the banner ads were annoying enough. (For some reason, the worst offenders were usually online casinos.)
Posted by: Narc | March 20, 2007 1:46 PM
In Short. They suck massively. They even crash my browser when I enable scripts.
Posted by: T_U_T | March 20, 2007 1:47 PM
OK, you got me to click on the ad. And I'm also a fan of the pirate T-shirt.
Posted by: RickD | March 20, 2007 1:50 PM
In Firefox, there's a significant load lag time due to the video--the top part of the blog pops up just fine, then the video, then you sit & twiddle your thumbs while the remainder (like, say, comments) loads. It's an inconvenience, but okay to live with for now for me. But if it's crashing people's browsers, that's a big time no-no.
Posted by: OmegaMom | March 20, 2007 1:56 PM
I just have a grey box with a place to click in the center if I want to see it.
Firefox 2.0.0.2 on Windows XP.
Posted by: khan | March 20, 2007 1:56 PM
I've got ad blocking software so there's little effect except for a little grey area that says: Advertisement.
And if you'll allow me to go off topic -- PZ you might want to note that your readers can help reporters nail the Bush administration by reading the over 3,000 pages in the last document dump. I've got the links on my site:
Want to help some reporters nail the Bush Administration?
Posted by: Norman Doering | March 20, 2007 2:01 PM
I turned off a bunch of stuff in IE, including active scripting, and poof! It was gone.
But then I could not comment. Sigh.
Posted by: CalGeorge | March 20, 2007 2:07 PM
I finally installed AdBlock Plus in order to get rid of them. I didn't notice any specific bandwidth issues, it just interrupted the flow of the site.
Posted by: Tom Foss | March 20, 2007 2:10 PM
I second the observation that Safari 1.3 for Mac crashes within seconds of loading the Pharyngula front page. I got by it by clicking the "Comments" link as fast as I could.
Posted by: buglady | March 20, 2007 2:18 PM
I just crashed it by clicking on a "comments" link (that is, after having successfully prevented the crash by clicking "cancel" before the deadline).
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 20, 2007 2:41 PM
Mooney steps in it and Somerby is there, predicting the inevitable:
Weird! Mooney's the type of fiery liberal who will pen "a diatribe" against "the Right." But isn't it odd! He doesn't have a word to say about the New York Times! No, we can't mind-read this fiery young fellow's motives. But in trashing the right--and whitewashing the Times--Mooney does set up a lucrative mainstream writing career. In the future, when you see his by-line appear in the Times--he has already published for the Los Angeles variant--remember the knives he put in Gore's back to keep his own career hopes alive. Remember the knives he put in the back of you and your ongoing interests.
Posted by: Great White Wonder | March 20, 2007 2:42 PM
Adblock for Firefox takes care of it for me, I just had to search out the correct element.
Posted by: Chris | March 20, 2007 2:43 PM
I just crashed it by scrolling down, and then by clicking on a "comment" link. I guess I must have clicked "cancel" too early both times, before the important parts of the page were all there. I think I need to go home where I don't have a bleeping Mac... :-)
In what? I think you're posting to the wrong thread again -- and this time I can't figure out which thread you meant to post in.
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 20, 2007 2:49 PM
PZ, I've been having a problem lately where the whole page won't load, just maybe the first 3-5 entries. I dunno if this is related or not, but I wanted to complain!
Posted by: Ethyl | March 20, 2007 2:54 PM
Psst- for those of you with adblock plus trying to block the darned things (I tried too, they kept coming back), just delete everything in the URL but for the "parent" website (I forgot what it was... admin.something.com?) once the thing pops up when you click "adblock" to block them.
Posted by: TAW | March 20, 2007 2:56 PM
I'm surprised you didn't mention she is wearing a pirate T-shirt. (look around 25s)Is that why it got a special mention?
Posted by: apthorp | March 20, 2007 3:06 PM
Weird, I read this thread, hit the back button, and it locked my browser for the first time. Most of the time it just takes too long for the page to load and when it does, the down scroll bar doesn't work for a while. I'm glad that this is broadband on a fairly new computer or it would really be a major pain in the ass.
Posted by: Mena | March 20, 2007 3:07 PM
I used *brightcove* as a wildcard filter in AdBlock and killed it with that. If you're too specific, the next ad will slip by. I may have to release a little-- for all I know, *brightcove* supplies vital elements on the page-- but I can still comment, so that's a good sign.
Posted by: DaveX | March 20, 2007 3:37 PM
Huh. I didn't have any troubles except that the stupid video quit playing every few seconds, and I had to manually grab the progress bar thingie and haul it along.
That said, I really, REALLY want one of those cannons that fires a 2x4 at a hundred miles an hour.
Posted by: mjfgates | March 20, 2007 3:47 PM
It looks like that ad might be putting the narrator in a bit of a controversy, according to a news spot on Huffington Post.
Posted by: Philip Brooks | March 20, 2007 3:50 PM
Ads make kittens kill themselves.
Posted by: Clitoral Hood | March 20, 2007 3:51 PM
I have firefox with adblock plus, and it does still take significant time to load the page. Strangely the gray adblock square does come up, but so does the video. I've added the parent site and *brightcove* to my filter, but it still takes the time to load it. Grrr. I understand the need for ads, but I don't want them to affect load time!
Posted by: Carlie | March 20, 2007 4:00 PM
I have noscript for firefox installed, and this site links to a lot of external ad scripts. I had to look at the source code to figure out that your new ads from from Brightcove.com. I have to say I like this new kind of ad! Unfortunately, I had an interesting new kind of error where if my cursor focus is not in a form or textarea, the ad steals my focus and somehow I managed to pause it when I hit a key. Then I couldn't focus on the textarea again for this comment until I resumed the ad. How rude, du pont!
Posted by: Aerik | March 20, 2007 4:12 PM
Im using Firefox 2 on XP. It seemed to load okay, but it does interfere with the flow of text, so brightcove has been added to my Adblock Plus list. Sorry.
If it had been positioned in the sidebar, I probably would have left it alone, and maybe clicked on it occasionally. Just a suggestion.
Posted by: Mark H. | March 20, 2007 4:23 PM
I've had no performance problems, though I agree the ad is visually obtrusive.
For all the safari users, I have to point out that safari crashes anytime you try to do anything. It's a terrible program, which is a bit of a surprise given Apple's record.
Posted by: Evan | March 20, 2007 4:32 PM
I've just tried it on IE7 and Opera 9. Works fine, but it IS a CPU hog.
Interesting vid though. And that "I
Posted by: Mark H. | March 20, 2007 4:34 PM
I see a message there: "WE'RE SORRY. You need to upgrade your Flash player." I disagree on both counts: I'm not sorry, and I don't perceive any need to upgrade my Flash player.
Posted by: David Canzi | March 20, 2007 4:36 PM
Well, at least Dupont doesn't make PBDEs.
Posted by: Tlazolteotl | March 20, 2007 4:42 PM
Before this ad I can't remember the last time Safari crashed. Must be the sites you are visiting. :-}
Interestingly today's ad is not crashing me (Safari 1.32). I enjoyed both ads. Is it a compliment for science nerds to be narrowly targeted by the ad agency?
I want to know if they faked the roof lifting off. What a moment, if it is real!
Posted by: JohnnieCanuck | March 20, 2007 4:49 PM
PZ, does are you actually in the hole with your bandwidth costs for Pharyngula? It's hard to imagine you aren't making a pretty good side income off a site with this much traffic. And a very well-deserved one, I might add.
As a webmaster it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people say they need to include more ads to "help pay for bandwidth." Unless the site has no ads yet at all, or the income per pageview on the existing ads is at the bottom of the industry, the income should rapidly outgrow bandwidth costs. Especially when you're not hosting video or huge images.
When I increase the ads on one of my sites I just say it's because I want more money. Nothing wrong with that. A website like this is a lot of hard work and you deserve to be well paid for it. But it irks me when I see "bandwidth costs" held up as the catch-all excuse, as if "theater tickets and help with the mortgage" isn't a good enough reason to monetize. That is, of course, unless your ads actually aren't making your site profitable... in which case I'm just really curious what kind of bandwidth numbers make that happen.
Posted by: God | March 20, 2007 5:30 PM
Hott!!
Posted by: Adwatcher 3000 | March 20, 2007 5:41 PM
I am also having problems with the ad. It crashes Safari and IE on both my Macs. I got through by stopping the page from loading before it was fully loaded, but this also prevented any pictures from loading.
Posted by: Patrick Quigley | March 20, 2007 5:45 PM
I'm on a fixed fee schedule here, so I get paid the same whether a million people show up or no one (it's a fair sum, so I'm not complaining). I pay out absolutely nothing. Seed is an institution that hopes to make money, and they are paying for servers, a technical support person, and other people who are helping us out behind the scenes. So yeah, "bandwidth costs" is just a euphemism for all that behind-the-scenes jiggery-pokery and beancounters in visors and people in suits and stuff like that -- and also, Seed is working on building a multimedia science empire, with Scienceblogs as just one piece of the puzzle, so if we were raking in buckets of cash, the profits would be redirected into one of their other pursuits, I'm sure.
But hey, you're god! How about just zapping megamillions into Seed's bank accounts, a few millions on the side for me, and giving us all a free infinite bandwidth pipe for our server?
Posted by: PZ Myers | March 20, 2007 5:45 PM
In my experience, it's the best browser on the Mac...
(The worst browser ever is IE for Mac. It fulfills every prejudice against Microsoft you have ever contemplated.)
Posted by: David Marjanović | March 20, 2007 5:52 PM
My IE7 never fully loads the page, always "waiting for ..." in the status bar with a stalled progress bar.
Sometimes only half the page content loads.
Posted by: Zwirko | March 20, 2007 7:10 PM
PZ:
So, you don't actually make money off the Dilbert-fan invasions? I'm crestfallen.
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | March 20, 2007 8:07 PM
It is slow, and not everything is loading. The links on the right side (to scienceblogs and others) are not loading. Some pictures in posts are not loading. Please, we are already overwhelmed with ads.
Posted by: Jim | March 20, 2007 8:46 PM
The experiences of other readers exemplify why I tend to just keep AdBlock *and* NoScript turned on most of the time.
Posted by: David Harmon | March 20, 2007 9:07 PM
By the way, I'm having no trouble at all with the ads. They just sit there unless I'm bored enough to click on them. It's not affecting my load time at all. (Using Safari on Mac OS X.)
No problems here either. IE6 and Windoze 98SE. This box is hardened, though.
Posted by: Graculus | March 20, 2007 9:38 PM
Like #8, everything is working well with Safari and Mac OS X for me.
Posted by: Odonata | March 20, 2007 9:53 PM
Ah, that makes more sense then.
Er, ah, um... I'll get right on it! As soon as I've got this pony situation straightened out.
Posted by: God | March 21, 2007 1:40 AM
VERY erratic.
Subsidiary pages on single subjects, like this one usually load with no trouble.
The Main-page SOMETIMES loads, sometimes hangs, with most of the content, but it is still trying to laod it all, several minutes later, ... and
Sometimes
it doesn't load at all - I wondered if it was my mahine, at first.
Oh, and I have to hit "back" twice to return to the main-page from a subsidiary.
Not good news.
Posted by: G. Tingey | March 21, 2007 5:05 AM
I'm also reporting lots of crashing using Safari 1.3 under Mac OS X 10.3.9. I'd upgrade to 10.4 but my computer is too old. :-(
I wouldn't be surprised if it plays better with 10.4, but I've been too lazy to try on my other computer.
Posted by: Matthew Morse | March 21, 2007 10:09 AM
God, of course it's feasible that PZ isn't making enough money off of his blog. I think you underestimate just how well adblocking software can be. When people aren't clicking the links, PZ's not getting the change. You can't get money for ads just by virtue of people visiting the page.
Posted by: Aerik | March 21, 2007 1:01 PM
Adblock will get rid of these annoying ads if you don't want to see them. It can also block the picture of Ed's enormous head on the Dispatches site if that disturbs you as much as it does me.
Posted by: Flaccid Bee | March 21, 2007 2:07 PM
The sciencebloggers are completely insulated from the mechanics or profits of ads -- I'm on a fixed fee schedule, the others are paid for visits, not click-throughs. Seed, of course, cares about click-throughs, and probably has all kinds of data on rates that they can shop to potential clients, but the bloggers themselves don't have any direct connection to advertisers at all. Which is all to the good, I think -- we only have to pimp ourselves to readers, not to advertisers.
Posted by: PZ Myers | March 21, 2007 2:21 PM
Other than the visual intrusion I have no trouble.
(MacOS X 10.4.8 / Safari 2.0.4 / Pithhelmet 2.6.7)
Posted by: Keith Douglas | March 21, 2007 4:37 PM
OMG. Keep the sciency ads coming!
Posted by: booger | March 22, 2007 12:42 PM
Professor Myers:
I usually use Safari 2.0.3 with Mac OS 10.4.6 and your blog has been crashing it frequently ever since the new ads appeared. I emailed you regarding this problem-- then I saw your post on your email difficulties shortly thereafter and I thus presume my email may have been lost under the mass of computerized missives you have received from other sources.
BTW, I have the same problem with my mail; I have a little over 3,000 messages stored within and it's starting to slow down. If you find out a way around this problem, post it here so I can see!
Posted by: Maronan | March 22, 2007 3:23 PM