Thank you for replying. I'm the author of the article and have felt bad sniping at the engineers at the LA Times. It helps to know you understand the technical problem. It must be very frustrating to see the ad networks' code wrecking your website.

Your ad sales and IT team are killing your company. They are taking your good product, the journalism and your well written Javascript, and they are smearing a thick paste of shit all over it. Some of this shit is visible, like the grocery circular popover and the auto-loading video ads. Some of it is invisible, like the 10 megabytes/minute I blogged about. But that shit has a smell. Readers don't like getting shit on their hands when reading the newspaper. They don't like smelling shit. They will stop going to your website.

The ROI on cleaning up the ads tech mess will not be immediate. It will probably be negative in the short term. But in the long term it's the only way to save the newspaper. I'm anxious about the future of the newspaper business too and don't know what the solution is. But I'm sure it's not this ad escalation.