As a result of the GDPR going into effect, USA Today is—presumably temporarily—running a special version of their site for those in the European Union. This version has all the ads and tracking scripts disabled. Marcel Freinbichler shows us the shocking—if not really surprising—results:
Because of #GDPR, USA Today decided to run a separate version of their website for EU users, which has all the tracking scripts and ads removed. The site seemed very fast, so I did a performance audit. How fast the internet could be without all the junk! 🙄
5.2MB → 500KB pic.twitter.com/xwSqqsQR3s— Marcel Freinbichler (@fr3ino) May 26, 2018
If you click on the tweet, you can see the rest of the thread, which includes these statistics:
- Load time went from more than 45 to 3 seconds.
- Javascript files loaded went from 124 to 0.
- HTML requests went from more than 500 to 34.
As I’ve said many times in the past, I understand and accept the need for content providers such as USA Today to serve advertisements. They have to pay for running their business some way after all. But when you get 10% content and 90% tracking and ads, it seems to me that they’re abusing their readers’ goodwill and understanding.