Adverts affecting web speeds (1 Viewer)

Can I ask, does anyone else experience some websites to be that little bit slower to first load in as they sit and wait for the adverts to appear?

I find that with this website, when I first come to it, I'm not able to do anything for a good 4 or 5 seconds until all the adverts appear, then I can scroll down the page to get to the forum I want.

I'm using a Macbook with Safari, 4GB RAM, just over a year old, on a 20Mbps connection. I find Firefox to be slightly faster, but I still have a hypothesis that waiting for these adverts to load in can and is slowing down the web experience.

Ads do slow things down, but you should usually be able to carry on with what you are doing as they load (or don't), can't comment on how Birdforum runs, but I know on my site, the average load time according to google is 400 milliseconds (or something), but the slow bits are the ads launching, as generally with ads they come from a seperate webserver.

I find that what happens (especially on BirdForum more than anywhere else), is that the website opens and just hangs at the top of forums, I'm not able to scroll down until the adverts are ready. I get the Mac's spinning icon to say it's thinking or busy processing, so don't know if it's really the website or if it's the Mac struggling for whatever reason.

I think I'll switch to my Windows partition and give it another shot, and then also try from work to see if I can isolate what the problem is.

Ya know, a small donation to BirdForum would make the majority of the ads go bye-bye

If your using Firefox you can get an add-on ( Addblock Plus) that blocks most ads, many sites only exist because they make money from these ads to pay for there existence on the net.