Waiting for b.scorecardresearch.com...

[John]

Is there any chance Ning will remove b.scorecardresearch.com from our networks?

When it takes a long time to finish loading the user spends precious time looking at her mouse pointer instead of the content.

[Eric Suesz]

Hey, John. I really respect the fact that this is bugging you and want to try and fix it, but it can be really hard for us to see the same thing sometimes. 

For example, we just tested this on your network a few times (we doubled up on each test batch to compare results):

• The initial calls to b.scorecardresearch.com loaded in 65 ms and 96ms, respectively. That's a total of about 160 ms, which is less than 1/5 of a second.
• We tried it again and simply reloaded the page. It took 274 ms and 107 ms. That's less than .5 second. 
• Our third try (ignoring the cache) gave us a total of 180ms. Again, less than 1/5 of a second. 

So, it appears that mileage may vary, but we're not seeing a massive slowdown like you are. Is it possible it could be some other piece of code that is slowing things down for you? Another theory Aaron has is to see if it could possibly be related to Javascript on your computer itself? Just some theories we wanted to toss out there in the hope that it can help lead to a resolution of some sort.  

[John]

Don't tell me that it's intermittent.  I already know that.

Tell me that even though the beacon is Industry-Standard you care more about the performance of your network and will remove ScorecardResearch.

[John]

I've said all I'm going to on this topic.

Cheers!
John

[Eric Suesz]

I'm very sorry, John. I don't have the power to simply remove this. I'm not trying to combat your reports or diminish them in any way. I just wanted to offer up the results we had with our own testing in the hope that it might help us troubleshoot it. It could be that this beacon is causing this, but I can't say for certain. I will continue to report your findings to our team in the hope that something more can be done.