Indeed. I recently did an efficiency survey of the websites of some of the nation's most popular news sources (not including social media or search engines).
Suffice it to say, some are extremely heavy-duty, to the point that some tests failed to work at all, due to page load times / excessive requests. In some cases, more than 50% of a site's requests was ads/trackers, and in more that half of them we are talking at least 1-2 Meg of data overheads just on ads/trackers/spurious requests (with an average site size without ads of 2.5 Meg).
Full page load times ranged from 2 seconds to 45 seconds (remember this isn't 56k either!). Many delays were due to third party scripts, bad requests and redirects, and of course, the bad placement of scripts in the main code. I'm sure that many designers / developers show their results to the boss on a local machine or within spitting distance of the server to give the impression of fast load times.
The worst offender of the bunch had 760 requests without ad blockers, down to 187 with ad blocking (75% ads / tracker requests). That's not including sites that failed to test. None of the sites failed to test with ad blocking.
That's the price of heavy image ads, unnecessary banners and sponsored backgrounds. TBB is no better tbh, statistically speaking. Although the ads / trackers make up two thirds of a meg, the ads-free version is only a third of a meg. Thankfully, the overall ads-included size is one meg in total, which is a small overall footprint in comparison to the surveyed sites (TBB would have ranked 2nd for page size with ads, and 1st without ads if included in the survey).
Of course, with no ads at all, and only the simple Google Analytics tracker present, my site's footprint is virtually unchanged (0.1 of a Meg). In fact, using an ad blocker on my site adds 25% to the page load time (+0.3 seconds).
Edited by camieabz (Fri 22-Sep-17 13:34:24)
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camieabz
