Lewis,
There are many factors that determine exactly how quickly particular sites, screens, banners or ads load.
The load you claim is taking 7 or 8 seconds, is not what is experienced by the overwhelming majority of our users.
Since we know from our own tests that the most of the site itself loads in a second or two, the "cause" of your slow loading time cannot be remedied by anything we could do.
The TBN site is designed to accommodate most average users. From time to time, some people have longer load times. It is not due to the TBN site loading slowly, but to individual operating systems variables, video card configurations, or memory, or virus checking or other system software, or ???
Virtually every commercial site on the Internet has some kind of advertising. Various kinds of ads come and go, and we are always evaluating the types we run here on TBN. For the vast majority of users, TBN continues to be one of the best performing web sites they visit.
We truly do sympathize with those who had speed problems, but according to our programmers, it is not due to our site itself, but to hardware, software and configuration issues of individual users.