I go to the Washington Post daily but lately I’ve been skipping it. One of my favorite blogs is VC Fred Wilson’s A VC but until recently I had stopped reading it regularly. Why? Because the ads and widgets on these sites would load but clog things up so much that the actual content I was there for wouldn’t load.

Fred recently removed most of his widgets (he loves them because they are from companies he invests in- I think if I were him this would raise a red flag) because he was getting slow-loading complaints from his readers. The site now loads fine. The Post isn’t doing so well. This morning I attempted to get to a page I read daily but all that loaded was an animated banner ad which irritatingly kept animating while the site stayed empty with 49 of 50 items downloaded. I guess the 50th item was the actual news.

This makes me wonder how often site owners test loading times, including ads, in conditions similar to an average user. Some sites, like Engadget, load really fast even with a plethora of ads. I suspect this is because they, being techies, actually care about loading times and require their ad servers to achieve certain levels of performance.

The big problem here is obvious. It looks like ads are more important to publishers than the user-experience. That insults me and keeps me away, especially because it looks like they just don’t care or are not paying attention. As a publisher my concerns are acquiring and keeping loyal readers, i.e. traffic. We won’t serve up irrelevant ads or ads that are intrusive including pop-ups, intermediary pages, ads with audio on by default or ads with so much animation they clog up the pipes. I don’t want to lose one loyal visitor because of these things because repeat traffic is where you make the money.

Washington Post…hello? Are you paying attention? It doesn’t look like it.

BTW, the NYTimes.com does not have this issue so it is not a universal problem.