Jerry,
Not everyone has experienced slow down in their access to TBN during this ad campaign.
Most ordinary users have little or no technical knowledge of computers to speak of (and especially dial-up users). Generally speaking, they do nothing at all to adjust, tweak or optimize their settings that their computer arrived with. I am not trying to offend anyone; this is just the fact of access for a significant percentage of all users, not just TBN members.
Moreover, most people who use the factory setup of their computer have various layers of "helper" apps like spyware and virus checkers, e-mail scripts and many other programs, that all can add time to the "surfing experience." They do not even know what is running, and cannot be expected to go inside their Windows OS settings to make proper changes.
Yes, the Deere ad does place greater demand on resources. But we cannot try and optimize every different user's setups, because there are many hundreds of them, all different.
The entire "Internet experience" at the moment is in a kind of midway stage -- where maybe 65% or so of users now have broadband; but at least 25% or more have dial-up.
Knowing that more than 50% of home users now have broadband, many companies have opened the flood gates as it were, and want to create the most aggressive and challenging apps, like complex Java script banners, video and audio inserts into web pages and e-mail, etc.
Personally I do not agree with this development, because so many people, literally tens of millions, are still "struggling along with computers that are several years old, and less than maximum access speeds.
We are on an Adelphia cable special high speed link, which supposedly provides around 5 megs/sec download and around 1 mg upload. Our tests indicate these are actual speeds for the most part.
So obviously, we do not experience much if any problems with loading times.
It is not an easy thing to tweak one's system settings to get maximum performance out of an Internet connection. Digital satellite definitely has what is known as "latency problems" meaning time lag between a call of a page and the actual download. Since virtually every page that is "called" from TBN is made new, you probably are going to have the worst possible experience using satellite connection.
Having said all that, we are aware of the issues; one of our problems is that the people who actually place the ads for the John Deere company, are not the same office that makes the banner ads. Ad agencies and artistic people are famous for going way overboard with their "creative."
If Muhammad had access to the actual code being used on the Deere banners, he could easily optimize it. But that is not possible for this campaign.
Believe me, he will be speaking with all of the people on the client side, and make them aware of the problems this particular campaign has caused. He has various suggestions for how the speed issues can be improved for those with limited speed access.
In the meantime, the "solution" is to shut off banners, turn off Java script. Then the Deere ad would have no effect on your surfing experience, except you would not see the ads.
Or you can search on Google for the key words or phrase "speed up Internet access". Lots of things to try.
Hope this helps.
