An analysis of a NYT article load finds 422 network requests totaling 49MB, triggering a sprawling programmatic ad auction, an example of “hostile architecture”
If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.
Shubham Bose
Related Coverage
- ★ ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’ … This is an absolutely devastating deconstruction of the current web landscape. Daring Fireball · John Gruber
- The 49MB web page Hacker News
- The 49MB Web Page Lobsters
- «The 49MB Web Page» is a great summary of all that's wrong with much of the web along explanations of how we ended up there due to commercial ad incentives. — https://thatshubham.com/... @gedankenstuecke … · Bastian Greshake Tzovaras
- This analysis is on spot. We can possibly do things better on the ads end. But the modals? Ouch! — The 49 MB web page. — https://thatshubham.com/... #design #webdev #accessibility @ppatel@mstdn.social · Pratik Patel
- Hacker News Discussion on Shubham Bose's ‘The 49MB Web Page’ Daring Fireball · John Gruber
- 'I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth of data just to read a few paragraphs of text.' — https://thatshubham.com/... @js@podcastindex.social · John Spurlock
- “The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it.” — https://daringfireball.net/... @assaf@mas.to · Assaf
- Loading... Click, click, click, click ... just one second ... click, click, click ... almost there. NextDraft · Dave Pell
Discussion
-
@leahlibresco
Leah Libresco Sargeant
on x
“A user is on paragraph #2. Suddenly, the text jumps down 250 pixels and they lose their place. Why? An ad network finally resolved its bidding process and injected an iframe above the viewport. In Google's Core Web Vitals, this is measured as Cumulative Layout Shift”
-
@leahlibresco
Leah Libresco Sargeant
on x
“As a publisher, you can't force a user through 3-4 dismissive actions before content is properly visible and expect the experience to be appreciated. Doing so is equivalent to burning your user's cognitive budget before value is delivered.” https://thatshubham.com/...
-
@shriramk@mastodon.social
Shriram Krishnamurthi
on mastodon
This article is rightly making the rounds, but somewhat misses the point. The Guardian annoys you because you aren't paying. What is really off here—and the article completely fails to talk about—is what they do to *subscribers*. I'm already PAYING! — https://thatshubham.com…
-
@mitchsaid
Mitch Said
on bluesky
nothing better illustrates the desperate search for a media business model like a 50MB web page with a 90:10 ad-to-content ratio
-
@maggie-lee
@maggie-lee
on bluesky
There's enough ad/tracking crap on a sample/typical modern news webpage to equal 10-12 songs on an old iPod 🤯 — Every damn time you just want to read an article, there's a hostile push of enough data at you to be like 10-12 songs of good quality — thatshubham.com/blog/news-au…
-
@indyposterboy.scot
Colin Dunn
on bluesky
“People are spending less and less time on the web because websites are becoming worse and worse experiences, but the publishers of websites are almost literally trying to dig their way out of that hole by adding more and more of the reader-hostile shit that . .” — daringfireba…
-
@hectorjcorrea@mastodon.social
Hector Correa
on mastodon
Good read: The 49MB Web Page — “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed…