Why slow ads are a revenue problem, a conversation with Catch Metrics
BY HAZEL BROADLEY, BEELER.TECH
For publishers, page speed is no longer just a technical concern. As advertising stacks become more complex and pages rely on dozens of third-party technologies, even small delays can affect viewability, user engagement, and ultimately revenue. Yet understanding what is causing those delays remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
In a recent conversation, we spoke to Catch Metrics about the hidden cost of slow pages and why performance has become a commercial issue, not just an engineering one.
Pages get heavier, ads take longer to appear, and teams are left asking whether the issue sits with consent, demand, code, or something else. Rob Beeler sat down with the company’s co-founders, Tom Allum and Martin Alderson, to discuss where latency originates, how it affects advertising outcomes, and why publishers need page-level data they can actually act on.
Check speed before the auction
While Catch Metrics is a new solution, Tom and Martin have spent 10 years helping publishers make pages faster. They came to market last year after years of consulting showed them a pretty big gap: publishers needed to see what was happening on the page, where latency came from, and how that affected ads, revenue, and user experience.
The thing is, publishing behaves differently from SaaS or ecommerce. A publisher may serve the same article to millions of readers, while carrying header bidding wrappers, consent tools, analytics tags, data tools, ad vendors, and their own code. Each partner may look fine within its own test, but the real page can behave differently once everything starts loading together.
To solve this, Catch Metrics looks at page speed alongside programmatic advertising. Publishers often start with auction dynamics, but a lot happens before the auction runs. If one script slows the path to consent, delays another dependency, or pushes back the first ad, the revenue problem has already begun.
Watch the real page, not the perfect test
A major point of the conversation was the difference between lab testing and real user monitoring. PageSpeed Insights can be useful, but it’s still a snapshot, often taken from one environment. Catch Metrics uses real user data, so publishers can see what people experience across devices, browsers, pages, hardware, and connection quality.
That’s especially important on mobile. For instance, a site that feels fine on a fast office laptop can behave quite differently on weak 4G or 5G, or inside an in-app browser such as Facebook. Averages can also hide the slowest users, even though those people may leave before ads load, which starts to cost the publisher money, and damage the brand experience.
The platform also supports custom metrics, such as “time to first ad” or “time for a consent management platform to fire.” Heat maps make the detail easier to interpret, because teams can see which scripts create delays, when they appear, and whether old A/B tests, forgotten vendors, or multiple instances of Prebid are still adding drag. Catch Metrics has also added crash reporting, which helps publishers understand missing traffic, what’s causing it, and how vast it is.
Leverage the hard evidence with vendors
Performance data changes the vendor conversation completely. Instead of saying, “I think your JavaScript might be slowing us down,” a publisher can show real user data and ask the vendor to respond. For example, an essential vendor recently reduced load time for a publisher by roughly 50% after seeing the evidence – and the fix happened quickly.
That same evidence can support stronger internal and commercial decisions. Catch Metrics has already spoken with a UK publisher’s legal team about using performance data in SLAs, because vendors often promise high performance before a contract is signed. The platform can also segment subscriber, unsubscribed, and guest traffic, which helps publishers see whether valuable users are suffering behind a reassuring average.
However, this certainly isn’t a case of “publishers versus vendors.” Catch Metrics also works with major vendors who know they need to be more performant. After all, faster pages help both sides.
Let the AI agent explain what changed
The AI layer is a big part of where Catch Metrics is going. Its performance agent can run investigations, use revenue and performance signals, and turn readable charts and API-accessible data into recommendations. Martin described the goal as moving from data points, graphs, and statistics toward clear guidance – do this, don’t do that, and here’s the likely impact. Tom went further, saying a 10-minute AI investigation can now improve on the consulting work they were doing months earlier.
Another important point to make is that the performance work doesn’t end once a publisher is plugged into the platform. For example, after speeding up a consent management platform, they found that another vendor change had made the site slower during the same period. Continuous monitoring is crucial because pages change constantly, and teams need to know which change caused the result.
The next step is building a more proactive agent. Instead of sending another alert saying the site got slower, Catch Metrics wants the system to explain why it happened and what can be done to fix it. Tom also pointed to a future where agents can help make fixes themselves, such as pausing a poor partner, or managing valuable web properties.
Speed wins because it touches almost everything publishers care about. Faster pages can mean more impressions, stronger inventory, a better user experience, and a better chance that someone comes back for another page view. And when publishers can see what’s really happening on the page, they can stop guessing, protect revenue, and make the open web faster for everyone. Or for more information, visit: catchmetrics.io.
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