For a few hours this morning, you might have noticed that some of your favorite sites were serving up fewer ads — or in some cases no ads at all. No, it’s not because you’re special (though you are, honestly) or because these sites decided to give you a break from slamming your senses with advertising; it was all due to an outage of Google’s ad server.
For the two of you that don’t know this, Google is responsible for serving up an enormous amount of the ads you try to avoid online every day. So when the Internet beast suffered a global outage of its Doubleclick for Publishers service this morning, it meant that a number of very popular sites — like YouTube, Time.com (and other Time Inc. sites), Forbes, BuzzFeed, our former kin at Gawker, and the Vox Media sites like The Verge — were without their full slate of ads.
This period of ad-free bliss lasted for a couple of hours and eventually ended around 10:45 a.m. this morning, according to GigaOm, one of the sites that uses the Google service.
Of course, while it provided consumers with a brief ad-less break from the norm, it also means that affected websites failed to earn ad revenue during those hours. For sites that measure their hourly pageviews in the millions, even a couple hours of downtime is a significant amount of cash they won’t earn this week.
Since we don’t accept ads and only make money by selling homemade LSD to college kids (Ed. Note: Not entirely true; we also sell to professors and staff), we weren’t affected by the outage and can gloat thusly:
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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