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Comment by jaredklewis

1 day ago

I just loaded the nytimes.com page as an experiment. The volume of tracking pixels and other ad non-sense is truly horrifying.

But at least in terms of the headline metric of bandwidth, it's somewhat less horrifying. With my ad-blocker off, Firefox showed 44.47mb transferred. Of that 36.30mb was mp4 videos. These videos were journalistic in nature (they were not ads).

So, yes in general, this is like the Hindenburg of web pages. But I still think it's worth noting that 80% of that headline bandwidth is videos, which is just part of the site's content. One could argue that it is too video heavy, but that's an editorial issue, not an engineering issue.

3 comments

jaredklewis

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squidbeak  1 day ago

Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?

  • jaredklewis  21 hours ago

    I don’t think you are supposed to think anything.

    It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play.

    But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.