A report on the size of newspaper home pages
The Bivings Report posted an interesting piece today in which they examined the size of newspaper home pages:
In looking at newspaper websites, it becomes clear pretty quickly that their homepages are bloated. They try to stick as much data as possible on the homepage (including ads).
Given that, we decided to look at the file sizes of the homepages of the top 10 newspapers, and how much of that file size is devoted to advertising. Note that file size does not always equate to load times. Other factors such as the number of database calls and the quality of the hosting environment play big roles.
Bivings downloaded the pages with ads and, using Adblock, without ads.
A few results:
USA Today
- With Ads: 735 KB
- No Ads: 570 KB
New York Times
-With Ads: 655 KB
-No Ads: 434 KB
LA Times
-With Ads: 897 KB
-No Ads: 772 KB
Chicago Tribune
-With Ads: 687 KB
-No Ads: 592 KB
Washington Post
-With Ads: 569 KB
-No Ads: 475 KB
Compare those numbers with the sizes of these common sites:
Google: 15 KB
Yahoo: 155 KB
Amazon: 519 KB
MySpace: 162 KB
Bivings notes:
Based on the sizes of these pages, none of these papers is designing for dial up users, except the Houston Chronicle.
The Chronicle’s numbers:
Houston Chronicle
-With Ads: 205 KB
-No Ads: 136 KB
Interesting stuff. I’ll have to keep an eye on these guys. Check out the full report here:
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/newspaper-homepages-and-load-times/
Bivings recently published a study of the features available on newspaper Web sites. Read it here:
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/american-newspapers-and-the-internet-threat-or-opportunity/
July 26th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Size matters, but not as much as you think. Like the authors state there’s more to load time than size. Most ad systems for example use SQL queries or bloated javascript to handle the ads. You can’t escape this, no matter the speed of your connection. Other page objects, even bloated in size such as CSS files, includes, background images and more can be cached, making the load time a great deal non-reliant on size.
July 29th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
[…] our previous post about the Bivings Report here: http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/a-report-on-the-size-of-newspaper-home-pages/ Bookmark this post:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
August 14th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
[…] our post about a previous Bivings Report report on the size of newspaper home […]