Crap to Content Ratio
The web turned to shit a long time ago, but just how much shit, exactly? Let’s find out.
Consider a seemingly innocent article about the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” on a BBC news website. My choice of this website was entirely random; I just happened to be browsing and clicked on it because I’m a fan of the Ninja Turtles.
This article, approximately 1000 words in length, is neither too long nor too short. It showcases five large images, various icons, logos, and thumbnails linked to other articles.
When you save the entire text and the primary images from this page, it totals about 297.8kb (kilobytes). If we account for the thumbnails, you can give or take a few kilobytes. This breaks down to roughly 11.4kb for the text and the remainder for the images.
Now, what if I told you that within a mere minute, this site made 181 requests and loaded an astounding 3.66Mb (Mega Bytes) Yes, an article about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with five images and some text totaling 297.8kb.
So, what is going on?
Cookies, analytics (of your behavior), trackers (tracking you), third-party requests (third-party, who?).
Here are some stats for this one-page article:
Cookies: 16
Third-party requests: 142 (Yes, One Hundred Forty-two third-party requests)
So what’s the crap to content ratio in this case? Let’s take an easy route and go by size in kilobytes.
3660kb : 297.8kb = 100 : 8.1366120218579
If you don’t like numbers, here’s a pie chart.