Facebook Cracks Down on Slow Ad Tech…
First up, Facebook’s decision to curate the web pages that it displays to viewers’ news feeds. The social platform has announced it will be penalizing any web pages that don’t load quickly enough — and a page’s loading speeds are almost always slowed by the ad tech that they rely on for income. According to Facebook, a delay of three seconds will make 40 percent of visitors to give up. Which sounds about right, really. “[…] Facebook’s News Feed algorithm will begin taking webpages’ estimated load times on the social network’s flagship mobile application into account, also factoring in users’ current connection speeds and the general speeds of the corresponding webpages.”
…And Google Cracks Down on Slow Apps
Meanwhile, Google has announced an incredibly similar approach to its Google Play store: It will be dinging the apps that are more likely to crash or even simply slow down a user’s phone. According to the company, this algorithm tweak will roll out over the next week. It’s going to be rough on Pokemon Go.
What It All Means
The end result will be faster webpages and better apps, meaning that Google and Facebook will have happier customers. The typical internet user gets a better experience. Meanwhile, the typical app creator or website engineer will have to work a little bit harder to make sure they meet the duopoly’s demands. Google and Facebook hoovered up 99 percent of the online ad industry’s growth last year. With these tweaks, they’re continuing to thin the herd of publishers vying for that final percentage point. Read more about changes at Facebook and Google at TechCo
