News sites are getting slower: the New York Times takes 4 mins and 2MB of data download to view one story
News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever — An analysis of download times highlights how poorly designed news sites are. That's more evidence of poor implementation of ads... and a strong case for ad blockers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Monday Note's measurement — one New York Times story costing readers roughly four minutes and 2MB of download — lands in mid-2015, when news publishers had stacked ad tech, trackers, and scripts onto pages to defend falling print revenue. The piece argues this bloat is less bad luck than poor [[a:1165539|ad implementation that later analyses trace through hundreds of network requests per page load]].
The timing matters because platforms were already moving to arbitrate the problem themselves: Google began highlighting AMP pages in mobile search within months, and Facebook soon moved to penalize advertisers whose destinations loaded slowly. The article is an early data point in the war over who fixes web performance — publishers, platforms, or readers armed with blockers.
First-order effects
- Readers on metered or slow connections pay directly for the Times' page weight — four minutes and 2MB per story makes casual reading expensive enough to push users toward apps, aggregators, or abandoning the visit.
- Ad-blocking advocates gain their strongest argument yet: if publisher pages are unusably heavy largely because of ads, blocking becomes a performance fix rather than a moral question.
Second-order effects
- Platform intermediaries seize the opening — Facebook's News Feed optimization for slow connections and its later threat to penalize slow-loading advertiser sites, plus Google's AMP push, shift distribution power from publishers to whoever controls the faster experience.
- Publishers face a forced trade-off: strip ad tech to win back readers and search placement, or keep monetization density and accelerate reader flight to blockers — tests showing dramatically faster loads with ad-blockers enabled quantify exactly what they lose.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the open web's advertising infrastructure becomes self-defeating: each added tracker degrades performance, driving users and traffic into platform walls like Facebook's feed where the platform sets both speed and monetization terms.
- A decade-scale split emerges between 'hostile' heavy pages and fast paths — and as later coverage of the junk-ad epidemic shows, the industry that chose bloat ends up fighting both reader abandonment and collapsing ad prices.
The trend: News publishing's race to monetize every page view is handing performance control from publishers to platforms and ad-blockers, restructuring who owns the reader relationship.