Bastian Greshake Tzovaras in Elk: "«The 49MB Web Page» is a ..."

«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/blog/news-audit

thatshubham.com

The 49MB Web Page

A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.

March 13, 2026 at 5:10:45 PM

ten years ago, Maciej Ceglowski made a case that loading these sites with mobile data generated more revenue for the cell phone provider than the publisher

It's an absolute shame he went into the transphobe hole. His talks on webpage sizes and data privacy were great.

is that a twitter thing? He seemed to move to twitter and that is like turning into a snake, it feels satisfying in the moment but it never helps. I don't know what he posts there.

I wonder if that has anything to do with search engines being broken and companies no longer optimizing their websites for Google. Many sure weren't doing it for their users.

That page is more than twice the size of my entire site.

yeah, the whole git repo of my uncompiled Jekyll Page before any optimizing is <70 mb, including some quite large images that I should shrink some