I was just thinking about this today as I watched my statmeter and it showed lower than normal traffic for Webmetricsguru.com; I found it took over a minute to load my blog in a browser when I could connect to it (every other or third time).

I've already contacted Know More Media about it and I'm sure it will be cleared up but it got me thinking about how web traffic numbers (visitors, uniques, pageviews even time spent per visitor) are influenced by the site being available in the first place.

And the problem for blog networks like Know More Media - who are probably pushing the limit on advertising they can fit on a page, and the additional slowdown in page loading that delays in Ad Servers can serve up - may make the whole blog monetization issue a toss up.   If you put so many ads on a page, with different advertisers - you run the risk of holding up part of the page that needs to load, waiting on that element of page - and increase the possibilities that the site will load slowly thereby working against having the advertising on the site in the first place - which seems to be what's happening on Webmetricsguru.com today.   I won't speak about any of the other blogs on our network as I haven't tried them, but usually a delay in my blog is symptomatic of an overall delay in all of them.

And it's also true that changes, if they are making some on the backend, are usually best done on the weekend -when people are less likely to be reading blogs quite as much.

What I'd like to see, in situations like this, is a seporate blog that records all work being done on the network, or in a blog template, or anything that might help explain why there are slowdowns and what steps are being taken to work on restoring service.

I've also noticed my Technorati listings seem to show, as of today, that the last time my site was crawled for content was 3 weeks ago - even though they list having seen content in the last 8 hours.  That makes me wonder how much of what we use to rank blogs is dependant on network infrastructure and middle-ware being up to snuff and working properly.

And finally, consider the case of Google.  Google's search results were better early on, but they're not much to brag about now, 10 years later, yet the ability for Google to deliver a simple search interface quickly is what, at the end of the day, might have won out over everyone else - who tended to clutter up their interfaces with portal experiences that many people did not want or need.

So just because you can serve more ads, squeeze out a couple more cents a visit, by showing something - I think all networks ought to balance out growth with quality of visit, quality of service.  In the case of my blog network, it's possible they may be serving too many ads, too much in one page to load quickly enough - and that's turning some people off.  I have no control over that and I'm sorry about it, I just provide the content.