When you land on a web page, do you consider how much it is stealing from you?

The original “anatomy of a spam page” was written in 2000, but recently, I landed on a web site that was so bad I decided to share a modern day spam page with you. You know a web site sucks if it’s like the following!

What is interesting about this kind of investigation is the sobering realization that this is just one site, and there are hundreds of thousands of sites just like this one, representing trillions of dollars lost in productivity every day simply because of screen spam — and worse, people have adapted to think it’s okay.

You know your web site sucks if it steals money, but you’re not getting rich

In researching some security topics I happened to run across a headline that I wanted to research, so I clicked to go read the article at “Tom’s Guide” … ???? The headline was : Google Shares Plan to Kill Phishing Attacks by Paul Wagenseil.

When I arrived at the page I was met by a shocking display of over-saturated screen spam, making the page unreadable. Actually, I never got to read the article. So many things were popping up, moving, and causing the page to jump up and down it was unreadable. Moving the cursor initiated all kinds of strange pop-ups and craziness. The page never stopped loading — it continued full-on loading, even after it had “loaded” all visible content. The spinning load indicator says loading or reciprocal negotiating was in progress. That means the site continues to read/write to your computer while you’re reading the article.

Quick, name the site you are visiting. Is the ad more important than the brand?

You know your web site sucks when the banner ad is more important than the brand.

See the ad across the top? It cycles every so-many seconds, and also causes the screen to refresh and jump. At the bottom there is a grid of eight false advertising, click bait squares, masquerading as “news” stories. You see in the lower right of the screen above? That’s a persistent video ad. No matter where you scroll or window re-scale, the ad stays there and continues playing. When it’s done, another one starts. When it starts, the whole screen jumps and the page reloads sending the reader to the top. This page wasn’t designed to be inviting and readable — I got out quick. But then I decided to do this article so I went back in. You know your web page sucks if it never stops loading!

You know your web site sucks if it takes longer than 7-seconds to load.

12 seconds into the page, the article still hadn’t loaded. There were three different pop-ups, and twice the pop-up to subscribe. I clicked the Firefox ‘Reader’ icon to clear all the pollution from the screen and get an error saying “Article failed to load.” So I turned off the Reader icon to find two videos with spinning circles trying to load. Looking down at the the activity indicator, it was negotiating loading with all kinds of off-site links. I could see the names flash by as it made calls to upteen different off-site links.

You know a web site sucks if it loads 60 cookies onto your computer.

On this second trip to the page, I had the cookies window open and watched them scroll in. This is fun, try it some time. Remember to deleted all the cookies before loading the page. Dozens of cookies began to scroll down the cookie window. I lost count. Do you see one there in the graphic called “GED_PLAYLIST_ACTIVITY”? Well, the instant I delete that cookie, it would pop right back in. It would never go away, kept coming right back in, meaning it was persistently connected to some unknown third party. You worried about NSA having your phone number, but you invite these people into your home? You know your web site sucks if the cookies won’t go away! NOTE: Medium doesn’t format images very well, nor will it align right, so I’ve posted the cookies at the bottom of this page.

You know your web site sucks if it takes 27 words of code to write a single word of content

!The page was delivering an article that used 4,497 characters for 739 words. A 700 word article isn’t bad. However, the actual web page sent me a whopping 152,585 characters as 18,405 words of code to simply display those 700 words! That’s like a 27 to 1 noise-to-content ratio. In my original “Anatomy of a Spam Page” article, the consensus was if the noise-to-content ratio was greater than 6 to 1, then it’s a spam site. This site is nearly five times that figure!

With line wrap turned off, the file has 1,429 lines of ascii text. However some of those text lines have as many as 11,000 characters! In 12 point Monaco font, that line will be roughly 60 feet long. Picture a line of text 720 inches long???? Really? But seriously, 14-hundred lines of text for a single web page (138K) is crazy!

Over 1,000 lines of text BEFORE the content. (compared to 49 lines of actual content!)

96,941 characters for the browser to digest BEFORE the first word of content — more than 48,000 characters AFTER the content

over 500 lines of text AFTER the content

198 href links to other pages or sites

20 items in the code tagged “hidden”

156 script calls on the page.

45 trackers on the page

84 calls to Google

60 cookies were loaded to my computer, two of which would not go away

Do you really think all that is necessary? Why would a 700-word article need 156 scripts or to make 84 calls to Google? Why could they possibly need 60 cookies?

Now to put this in perspective, I decided to show you the page. However you cannot truly appreciate the incredibility of this without a picture. So I did a screen scroll of the page, at 10 point Monaco on letter size. Photoshop ran out of cache and refused to go further than fifty lines or so BEFORE the content begins, so I had to do it in two files. Here is a picture of the page at 2% and we’ve added our 5-foot tall model, so you can appreciate the scale of this monster! The full pages are several megs, so if you want to see them, you can contact me. Or just visit the page, then right-click and select “view page source” and voila, behold the scope of the page!

As I pointed out in the first “Anatomy of a Spam Site” all the time you spend waiting for loading steals money from you because it’s preventing you from getting the content while it attempts to make money. You’re paying in bandwidth and your time. I’ve provided some other links and information below, where I’ll do the math on how much it costs in terms of lost productivity.

When you hit one of these web sites, just say “NO” and close the window.

Thanks for reading!

Below are the cookies this site dumped on me: