Charlie Stross Takes His Sense of Indignation for Its Sunday Walk
The large bandwidth downside of advertiser-supported media:
Charlie's Diary: Why your internet experience is slow: Here is a random-ish URL from Salon.com, a not too unusual online magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/05/09/askthepilot276/. This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith... 950 words of text... 6.5Kb.... (Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)
In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links.... But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?... I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files... in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read....
This is a novel in HTML.... "Accelerando" runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages.... It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words....
If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?
(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)
