There was a time when Google Adsense was unobtrusive.
When Adsense was introduced, I signed up immediately and began placing ads on all my sites. At first it was about the extra money I could make, but then I came to realize that the Google spiders came a-crawling much faster to my ad filled pages. Over the years, the money from ads has dwindled, but I kept the ads around for the benefit of the spiders.
Sadly, Adsense has gained a lot of weight. A typical ad will bring in 35KB of JavaScript files, plus whatever the ad contains, be it an image or a flash animation, which ads another 25KB to the page size. Total for a typical Adsense ad, 60KB, the page you’re looking at, 48KB.
Here I’m tweaking my XHTML code, compressing my CSS and JavaScript files, and I come to realize that Adsense is heavier than the code behind my sites. So I’ve begun removing Adsense from my sites, should Google slim down their ads, I’ll reconsider adding them back.
Ever carried the weight of another?
For how long?