Bits by Ethan Marcotte

I totally agree with Ethan’s assessment here. People are always saying “the web is slow, here’s how to make it fast” and they solve the problem from a technology perspective. But the mainstream web isn’t primarily slow because of an ignorance in how to make it fast. It’s slow because at the core of the web’s essence (and this is something that I think just happened organically over time) people expect everything on it to be free. So money has to be made somewhere, and it gets made by the boatloads of tracking/analytics JavaScript and other bloated bandwidth that ends up on websites.

ultimately, the web’s performance problem is a problem of profitability. If we’re going to talk about bloated pages, we should do so in context: in the context of a web where digital advertising revenue is cratering for publishers, but is positively flourishing for Facebook and Google. We should look at the underlying structural issues that incentivize a company to include heavy advertising scripts and pesky overlays, or examine the market challenges that force a publisher to adopt something like AMP.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This is the core issue.