A lot of people are paying for their data. If a web page uses 40 mb and you have 4GB of data quota per month, you can only load 100 pages per month. Apparently the article text describes the page actually using 500 MB over 5 minutes, which means a 4GB quota can be used for less than an hour of reading.
replyMaybe it's different if advertisers or publishers are paying viewer's data costs. But some amount of restraint might be nice. Personally, I don't use a lot on my phone when I'm out and about, other than chat apps, hn, text NPR and lite CNN, cause I used to be on a plan with a hard cutoff. But then, I have unmetered networking at home.
I mean, the utility that matters is the utility for PC Gamer of showing everyone the ads vs some people refusing to read them over data concerns.
replyYou might be paying for data, but you're not paying PC Gamer for reading them, so your opinion only starts to matter when you quit reading them over how much data they use.
A reader who hits their mobile data cap after thirty minutes on your site will not be viewing any more of your ads for the next month. But if businesses were capable of thinking more than exactly one step ahead for any action they take, the tech industry wouldn't be such a shithole in the first place, of course.
replyI don't think what these websites are doing is "good", but I can't see them stopping any time soon.
replyI imagine people remember what site they were on when the data usage warnings came up, and they don't come back.
replyThe question I guess is really if PC Gamer earns more by sending 100 mb / minute and chasing some eyeballs away faster, than by using a reasonable amount of data and losing eyeballs at the normal rate of attrition for written word outlets.
If anything ads on page built like that will make sure I won't buy that particular product ever
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