Via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, two great articles about websites that consume loads of connection and computer resources to try to monetize your attention:
Shubham Bose, The 49MB Web Page
I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.
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No individual engineer at the Times decided to make reading miserable. This architecture emerged from a thousand small incentive decisions, each locally rational yet collectively catastrophic.
Discussion on the Y Combinator site
Stuart Breckenridge, PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading
Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.
Madness.