User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/The Success and Future of Modernization/@comment-168424-20180124233428/@comment-20644-20180125010807

More ads for sure meant higher page load times. That's why, as of January 2017, we talked here on Central about direct and programmatic ads and how more direct advertising would lead to better performance, because having fewer but more valuable ads is better for site performance and reader retention.

Mobile ads that do things like redirect you to the App Store are ones we hate too. Those are low quality programmatic ads, creating mobile performance issues in much the same way that the more-problematic programmatic ads did on desktop. Now that we've had significant success on desktop, we'll be able to take a lot of what we succeeded in this year in creating a better advertising experience for both users and advertisers and apply it to mobile performance improvement.