People hate ads, and so do we.

Where’s the score?

Try this. Next time a match is on, open any sports-scoring app or live-score site on your phone and look for the score. Not the shirt sale. Not the video that started playing by itself. The score. How long did it take you to find it?

We tried it ourselves this month, on a live-score page from another sports-scoring site. No matches were on, so the only sports content was a single line saying so. Measured by height, a clothing carousel took about 36% of the screen. A banner pinned to the bottom took another 36%. Roughly seven-tenths of the phone was advertising.

That bottom banner has a name in the ad industry’s own rulebook. The Coalition for Better Ads, whose members include advertisers and ad platforms, asked more than 25,000 people to rate ad experiences. On phones, a large sticky ad is one that stays put while you scroll and takes more than 30% of the screen. It made the list of formats people found most disruptive, alongside pages where ads take up more than 30% of the content. The banner we saw sits at about 36% on its own.

Nobody asked you whether that was a fair trade. You came for a score, and the page decided you’d take the ads too, along with the tracking behind them. Most of us have stopped noticing because it’s everywhere. That doesn’t make it acceptable.

No to ads. No to tracking. No to our data being auctioned every time we check a score. No to anyone profiling the kids on court.

Expect the score to be the biggest thing on the screen, and expect a page to work without following you around the internet. If you play or watch, ask your organiser what they use. If you organise, demand better from the software your players and their families have to open. There’s a quick checklist at the end.

Ignoring an ad still costs you something.

Most of us think we’ve learned to tune ads out. The research says we pay for it anyway.

In a 2005 study, Moira Burke and colleagues tracked people’s eyes while they searched a list of news headlines. Participants rarely looked straight at the banners, yet both animated and static banners slowed their search. Flashing text banners also made the task feel harder. They called it high-cost banner blindness.

Daniel Goldstein, Preston McAfee and Siddharth Suri went further. They paid people to sort emails, let them quit whenever they liked, and showed some of them annoying ads while they worked. Those people left sooner. The researchers estimated the lost attention was worth more than a dollar per thousand impressions, which is more than such ads typically paid the site running them.

Now put that on the bleachers. A spectator at a tournament isn’t browsing. They want one fact: the score on Court 2, or when their next match is called. A parent checking between meetings has a few seconds. Every ad on that screen is competing for exactly those seconds.

Ads make pages heavy, and halls have bad signal.

In 2015, The New York Times loaded the home pages of 50 news sites on an iPhone, with and without an ad blocker. On many of them, more than half the data was ads and other blocked content. On the worst site, the ads took about 31 seconds to load over 4G. The news itself took about 8.

The web has changed since then. Badminton halls haven’t. They are big concrete boxes where hundreds of phones fight over indoor signal. A page that downloads an ad auction before it shows a score feels slowest exactly where spectators need it most.

SmashIQ’s live board does the opposite. While it’s open, it fetches a small score update every few seconds and changes the numbers in place. Nothing else needs to load first.

The ad you can see is the smaller problem.

Many ad slots are sold in an auction that runs while the page loads, in a fraction of a second. To help bidders decide what you’re worth, the site sends out a bid request describing the page and the person looking at it. Every bidder gets that description, not just the winner.

The scale is hard to picture. In 2022 the Irish Council for Civil Liberties estimated that these auctions broadcast what a person is viewing, and where they are, 747 times a day for the average internet user in the US and 376 times a day in Europe. It’s an advocacy group’s estimate, and it leaves out Meta and Amazon, so treat it as a floor rather than a precise count.

On a tournament site, the page address alone says a lot. Which event. Which venue. Which day. Often, which player you keep coming back to.

Many of the players are children.

Junior events run from under-11 to under-19. A player page for a 13-year-old shows her club, her events and, on tournament day, which court she’s on next. Put trackers on that page and you have a record of who follows a child, from where, and how often.

India’s law now draws a line here. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 bars tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at anyone under 18, with narrow exemptions, and requires verifiable consent from a parent before a child’s data is processed. The rules notified in November 2025 phase these duties in by May 2027.

We don’t need the deadline. There’s nothing on our player pages to switch off.

And the money is tiny.

You might expect all that tracking to pay well. Veronica Marotta, Vibhanshu Abhishek and Alessandro Acquisti studied millions of ad sales at a large US media company. When a tracking cookie was available, the site’s revenue went up by only about 4%, or about $0.00008 per ad. That’s less than one paisa.

The bigger cost is what ads do to a product’s priorities. A site that earns from ads wants more page views, more refreshes, more time on the page. A tournament site should want the opposite: give spectators the score quickly and let them get back to the match.

Secure by design.

Every public tournament page, from draws and live scores to player profiles, carries a strict browser security policy. It allows scripts, styles and images from smashiq.co and nowhere else. If an ad network, analytics tag or tracking pixel ever slipped in, the browser would refuse to load it. When you follow a link away from SmashIQ, we don’t tell the next site which page you came from.

Spectators don’t need an account. Players’ names, results and match analytics appear because the organiser published them for the tournament. They are never sold or shared for advertising.

And on the live board, the score gets the room.

Check any live-score page yourself.

1. Open it on your phone during a live match. How much of the first screen is the score?
2. Scroll. Does anything stay stuck to the screen while you move?
3. On a laptop, open the browser’s developer tools, choose Network and reload. Look at the list of domains. On a SmashIQ tournament page, every request goes to smashiq.co.
4. Organisers choosing software: ask who pays for it. If it isn’t you, ask what your spectators and junior players are paying with instead.

Sources

1. Burke, Hornof, Nilsen and Gorman, “High-cost banner blindness: Ads increase perceived workload, hinder visual search, and are forgotten”, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2005.
2. Goldstein, McAfee and Suri, “The cost of annoying ads”, WWW 2013; expanded in the Journal of Marketing Research, 2014.
3. Coalition for Better Ads, Better Ads Standards, including the mobile large sticky ad and ad density above 30%.
4. The New York Times, “The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites”, 2015.
5. Irish Council for Civil Liberties, report on the scale of real-time bidding data broadcasts, 2022.
6. Marotta, Abhishek and Acquisti, “Online Tracking and Publishers’ Revenues: An Empirical Analysis”, WEIS 2019.
7. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and DPDP Rules, 2025.