Hi guys,
I'm the founder of Stanza - the folks behind the calendar on Wowhead.
The thought process behind adding Stanza to wowhead was to wrap an existing ad with a content unit that adds value to users - i.e. maintain ad revenue but add more value. Ad unit is powered by the same folks that run the other ads on wowhead - logic here was to simplify setup and settings. Calendar itself loads quickly (cached version makes 50 requests + downloads 0.01 MB of data), which puts most of the requests/load cost on the ad unit as the OP pointed out.
There is one ad displayed currently on the StanzaCal on wowhead (we don't display ads outside of embeds) and yes, it is an autorefreshing unit like all others on the page. We don't use or implement any anti-ad-block software. We are looking into why this one ad is using more resources that all other ads on the page. In the short term, we have switched to another ad vendor and are still determining if that has had a positive impact.
The underlying problem is that for all publishers who "outsource" ad tech/revenue by working with 3rd party ad servers & exchanges, the tradeoff is the lack of control over the network calls made once the ad iFrame on the page. One longer term solution is to figure out a way to dynamically detect and shut down rogue ads that make insane number of network calls and we are actively working on that. If you'd be interested in helping us test out some of those solutions, feel free to reach out.
TLDR; ad tech sucks. we are trying to find solutions as fast as possible.
More details here:
There’s two notable ways that browser performance can be impacted.
JavaScript execution. Since JavaScript is a single threaded environment (mostly. Workers such as WebWorkers and ServiceWorkers run on separate threads, but those aren’t being used here), whenever JavaScript is running you can’t interact with the page. This means you can’t click on buttons, you can’t scroll, you can’t type in fields, etc. Most often, this is why a page feels slow as it contributes to “jank” or jerkiness.
Stanza has low impact in regard to JavaScript execution.
As you can see, Stanza is adding ~500ms of total 5374.1ms JavaScript execution time. This should be down to 250ms by the end of this week. While this isn’t ideal for an integration, it’s not experience breaking. Details here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6RctM6oQfBtR3dicm16MnJRa1k/view?usp=sharing
Profiling was done in chrome using the timeline tab with JavaScript checked. The cache was cleared before each test and the profiler ran for 30 seconds. Stanza.co was disabled by modifying /etc/hosts to point to 127.0.0.1.