&gt; Anybody willing to share what it&#x27;s like to work on a project like that?<p>I used to work at Business Insider and we definitely had similar problems. It basically boils down to marketing &amp; advertising being more important to publishers than technology or user experience.<p>It&#x27;s organizationally difficult to resist every marketer who wants to add &quot;just one line of JavaScript&quot; for their pet project. Then there&#x27;s the fact that you&#x27;re beholden to ad networks and can&#x27;t do much more than whack-a-mole when they serve junky ads. Probably once a day we&#x27;d notice a bad ad and have to block it from being served.<p>At one point, we got management buy-in for me to work on performance issues. We managed to improve performance by ~90%, but the bulk of the project was just exhaustively listing every script on the page and axing those which didn&#x27;t have a good justification. Amazingly, for a majority of the scripts, nobody even knew why there were there still (they were often added to please an old advertiser who wanted a specific measurement).<p>It&#x27;s hard to place blame. Developers don&#x27;t have the political clout to prevent the bloat and are often under-resourced as it is. Marketers want to gather metrics, but with the small development teams at most media companies it&#x27;s easier to rely on third-party vendors over performant in-house solutions. Management recognizes the problems, but without marketing and advertising there&#x27;s no business model.<p>Personally, I think ad networks are the ones who should be taking the lead here: they&#x27;re big enough that they can afford to block bad advertisers without endangering their profitability. They should be investing much more in automated solutions to detect and block bad&#x2F;heavy ads. Unfortunately, there&#x27;s not really an economic incentive for them to do so: users blame publishers for slow pages, not networks. And ad blocking is much more detrimental to publishers than the networks.