The broken web-version of displaying 1500 characters with 15 MB of Data
15 MB of Data for next to no content in the Web
Today I'd like to rant (again?) about how shitty the internet has become. I wanted to visit a popular News-Magazine-Website in Germany "Der Spiegel" - In this particular case It's an effectively (in theory) pretty simple site with focus on text.
However...
Opening the link I immediately saw the site being broken by my noscript. I'm quite used to this, so I looked whats being loaded. Enabled a few things and finally the "consent cookie" options popt up.
Until now, we have already loaded 2.35MB of Data, essentially most - if not all - the information you ever want from this site, is already there, it would even be looking ok for a normal user. (I do not consider myself a normal user, I'd be fine with a .txt file...)
But... lets see whats going on when I "consent".
43 trackers being loaded and all in all 6.5MB of Data. The script on this particular website that enables a "test" users can engage with, is not yet loaded.
In reality, the content a viewer is potentially interested in, is about 1500 characters of text, and a simple image. 1500 Characters of text = 1,5kb The image in webp format = 10kb
I'm aware of how modern "webdesign" works, so I give them a bit of headroom for "beautification" fonts and what not. I'm generous and say that 2MB would be acceptable.
What is happening in reality:
Without any adblocker or noscript, after clicking the consent button: 15,47MB data is sucked from the net for no reason.
With uBlock origin, and pretty default settings: 6.5MB data
This means, no matter what, even with adblocking, at least 4MB of data, for this very simple website are wasted for no reason what so ever.
In many European countries (and possibly elsewhere) mobile data is VERY expensive for users. In Germany, often a top-up monthly cycle of 10 euros does not include much more than 5GB.
This data is gone in a day after you browsed through your daily news.
I want advertisers to pay for MY data. I also want advertisers to be made responsible for malvertising. (Just for completion, I'm going to link 2 example sources (External 1, External 2) that talk about malvertising here.)
The example website in this particular case: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bildung/pisa-aufgaben-mathematik-koennen-sie-besser-rechnen-als-ein-15-jaehriger-a-8d71d5ec-c112-42f9-b7e7-dd34453c0b9c