eBay stole 15 seconds of my life

I wasn’t a keen advocate of adverts in My eBay when they first appeared. Now I’m even less enamoured by them.

The drop downs in My eBay don’t load until after the advert has loaded, and they’re the last part of the page to load. Now a missing advert results in my browser waiting for a non-existant image from rtm.qa.ebaystatic.com.

Once the page has loaded it takes about fifteen seconds for the advert to time out and default to a text link, during which time drop downs are unavailable.

Whilst I understand adverts equal click revenue I find it hard to believe eBay make much revenue from them. Adverts irritate me at the best of time and even more so now they’re not working. eBay are wasting a quarter of a minute of my time for each visit to My eBay.

I thought eBay displaying adverts in My eBay was bad, now I’ve realised that eBay failing to display adverts is even worse

9 Responses on "eBay stole 15 seconds of my life"

1. 1
   Dan Wilson says:

   January 11, 2008 at 1:04 am

   I’m looking back on the last decade of my life and thinking: “Only 15 seconds? They’ve had the best bloody years of mine.”

   ;o)
2. 2
   James says:

   January 11, 2008 at 1:46 am

   Use an adblocker and you don’t have to wait for the ad to load, until the javascript loads to allow drop down menus. (I tested it does work with FireFox and AdBlockPlus.)
3. 3
   Eddie says:

   January 11, 2008 at 7:46 am

   If you Google “srx.uk.ebayrtm.com” there is more info on this slow loading page situation
4. 4
   Louise says:

   January 11, 2008 at 8:44 am

   I find Explorer the worst for this ebay cock-up. Firefox and Opera don’t seem to be affected. Might be worth switching browsers until ebay sort it out or get rid.

   Hang on tho, why should we have to mess about trying to fix an ebay “site interferance” issue?
5. 5
   Chris Dawson says:

   January 11, 2008 at 9:42 am

   Hi Louise… I am using Firefox
6. 6
   Louise says:

   January 11, 2008 at 11:16 am

   Poor Chris.

   Seeing as ebay lowered the page position of the offsite links recently, is there hope for these ads in My Ebay to be downgraged too?
7. 7
   Chris Dawson says:

   January 11, 2008 at 12:48 pm

   Well the good news is that they’ve fixed it. The bad news is that they’re now advertising PayPal postage to me again which I have no intention of even considering using until it offers a substantial benefit… like a discount on the standard postage rate.
8. 8
   Steve says:

   January 11, 2008 at 3:07 pm

   I posted about this on the ebay PS Board – I have spent the last few weeks on a dial-up connection and the summary page took long enough to load as it is without having to wait about for an extra minute for a pointless ad to appear.

   There was nearly a front page news incident when one of the adverts pinged up and it was for Orange Broadband – which was the whole reason I was on dial-up in the first place!!!

   It would be nice if eBay allowed sellers to opt out of viewing any advertising schemes – we have enough to administer on ebay as it is without contend with this guff as well!
9. 9
   McDonalds: I’m (not) lovin’ it : TameBay says:

   January 17, 2008 at 2:22 pm

   [...] look good though, relevant ads I can understand, but I don’t want to wait for McDonalds adverts to load before I can use the drop downs in My eBay. Hell guys…. I’m trying to work here, not to snack on junk [...]