News sites collapsed as they fetched ads during Michael Jackson traffic surge

The tsunami of traffic related to Michael Jackson cripppled some web sites on Thursday because those sites had to wait for third party content, such as images for ads, according to a new analysis.
Keynote Systems said in a report tonight that its analysis of the web’s performance on Thursday showed sites collapsed from the traffic because they were built the wrong way. Those web sites waited for every image to be downloaded from a third-party advertisement service before displaying the web page to the reader. That led to frustrating delays. Better web sites are built to load a page and then leave a blank spot where it’s waiting for a third-party image to load.
The vast majority of online news sites display third party content such as ads and interactive images that are delivered from web servers and networks that are not operated by the news sites themselves. This means that these servers and the content they provide are often outside the control of the news sites. And that’s a recipe for slow performance.
“Our measurement data shows that for sites reported as having performance slowdowns yesterday, internal content delivered quite fast, however content that came from other sources contributed most to the site slowdowns,” said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems. “For example, ABC.com’s news content was consistently served in a matter of seconds whereas some of the third party content took much longer.”
White said that, to be prepared for unexpected news events, news sites should require third party content companies, such as ad networks, to certify the capacity of their networks, perform regular load tests from around the globe, and have strong agreements to get additional server capacity on the fly.
Keynote’s Online News Index includes the following news sites: ABC, AOL, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, CNN Money, Fox Business, Google Finance, Google News, LA Times, MSN Money, MSNBC, MarketWatch, NBC, NPR, NY Times, SF Chronicle, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News.
The analysis is enlightening. And it means that news sites, advertisers, and their technology providers all have to work together to enable fast performance during huge events.