The 49MB Web Page
=================

March 12th, 2026

If active distraction of readers of your own website was an Olympic
Sport, news publications would top the charts every time.

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.

It is the same story across top publishers today.

<https://thatshubham.com/img/newsbanner.webp>

To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page,
let's quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you
would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks).
The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page
load. In 2006, the iPod reigned supreme and digital music was
precious. A standard high-quality MP3 song at 192 kbps bitrate took
up around 4 to 5 MB. This singular page represents roughly 10 to 12
full-length songs. I essentially downloaded an entire album's worth
of data just to read a few paragraphs of text. According to the
International Telecommunication Union, the global average broadband
internet speed back then was about 1.5 Mbps. Your browser would
continue loading this monstrosity for several minutes, enough time
for you to walk away and make a cup of coffee.

<https://www.itu.int/itunews/manager/display.asp?lang=en&year=2006 &issue=05&ipage=update&ext=html>

If hardware has improved so much over the last 20 years, has the
modern framework/ad-tech stack completely negated that progress with abstraction and poorly architected bloat?

CPU throttles, tracking and privacy nightmares ==============================================

News websites really really like to track. <https://thatshubham.com/img/network.webp>

For the example above, taking a cursory look at the network waterfall
for a single article load reveals a sprawling, unregulated
programmatic ad auction happening entirely in the client's browser.
Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced
to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like
Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these
requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are
incredibly hostile to the browser's main thread. To facilitate this,
the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS. As a
publisher, you shouldn't run compute cycles to calculate ad yields
before rendering the actual journalism.

The user requests text.

The browser downloads 5MB of tracking JS.

A silent auction happens in the background, taxing the mobile CPU.

The winning bidder injects a carefully selected interstitial ad you
didn't ask for.

Common story across many offenders
<https://thatshubham.com/img/track.webp>

A relentless heartbeat of surveillance.

Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring
running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing
to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The
background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user's cross-site identity together
across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the
back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop?
Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these
tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside
requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is
Europe's IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the
consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles
through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie
banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to
protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the
background. But that's enough about NYT.

The Economics of Hostile Architecture
=====================================

Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this
programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader
retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is
slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize
the UI because they think they have to.

Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days.
Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The
longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher
can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and
designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you,
the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple
times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the
wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is
held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only
encourages but also rewards dark patterns.

And almost all modern news websites are guilty of some variation of
anti-user patterns. As a reminder, the NNgroup defines interaction
cost as the sum of mental and physical efforts a user must exert to
reach their goal. In the physical world, hostile architecture refers
to a park bench with spikes that prevent people from sleeping. In the
digital world, we can call it a system carefully engineered to
extract metrics at the expense of human cognitive load. Let's also
cover some popular user-hostile design choices that have gone
mainstream.

The Pre-Read Ambush
===================

Selected GDPR examples
<https://thatshubham.com/img/gdpr.webp>

The advantage and disadvantages of these have been discussed in tech
circles ever since they launched.

When a user clicks a news link, they have a singular purpose of
reading the headline and going through the text. The problem is that
upon page load, users are greeted by what I call Z-Index Warfare. The GDPR/Cookie banners occupy the bottom 30%. The user scrolls once and
witnesses a "Subscribe to our Newsletter" modal. Meanwhile the
browser has started hammering them with allow notification prompts.

The user must perform visual triage, identify the close icons (which
are deliberately given low contrast) and execute side quests just to
access the 5KB of text they came for. Let's look at how all these
anti-patterns combine into a single, user-hostile experience. Here is
a teardown of a standard page load of Economic Times.

UX Teardown
===========

Economic Times
<https://thatshubham.com/img/economictimes.webp>

Economic Times: Imagine deploying this to production. Does anyone
even care about how their end-product appears to a user anymore?

1 Critical Error: The Double Modal Ambush -----------------------------------------

The user is hit with not one, but two simultaneous Google sign-in
prompts. One is a centered custom modal completely obscuring the
text, while the standard Google tap modal slides in from the top
right. This is a severe violation of serialized onboarding, causing
confusion to a first-time user.

2 Severe Issue: Viewport suffocation
------------------------------------

Examine the screen real estate. We have a top banner ad, a left
skyscraper, a right skyscraper and an inline ad block. The actual
article content occupies roughly 15% of the screen real-estate. The
publisher has inverted the content-to-chrome ratio.

3 Laborious non-work: Unacceptable Interaction Cost ---------------------------------------------------

Before reading a single sentence, the user must locate and click the
"X" on the center modal, do the same for the top right modal, and
scroll past the massive top banner. By forcing them to perform
digital housekeeping just to access the content, the publisher
creates unnecessary hurdles for the reader.

Sources & UX Heuristics Violated
--------------------------------

Aesthetic and Minimalist Design - Interfaces should not contain
information that is irrelevant or rarely needed

[NN/g Usability Heuristic #8] <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/>

Interaction Cost- The double-modal forces high physical interaction
cost before value is delivered

[NN/g Interaction Cost] <https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interaction-cost-definition/>

Core Web Vitals (Intrusive Interstitials) - Google's own search
guidelines penalize pages where content is not easily accessible due
to intrusive pop-ups covering the main content immediately after
navigation

[Google Search Central]
<https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ avoid-intrusive-interstitials>

The CLS Disaster
================

A user is on paragraph #2. Suddenly, the text jumps down 250 pixels
and they lose their place. Why? An ad network finally resolved its
bidding process and injected an iframe above the viewport. In
Google's Core Web Vitals, this is measured as Cumulative Layout
Shift. High CLS correlates often directly with high abandonment
rates.

Take into context that the CLS disasters, the intrusive modals or
even the render-blocking scripts all supposedly lower your page's
scores. And Google officially penalizes all of these for SEO, well in
theory. What's strange is that Google's own ad products are what's
helping enable this too.

Domain authority and media-house reputation ensure these sites keep
appearing at the top of your results. Google's search arm penalizes
the crime while Google's ads arm sells the weapon.

The Sticky Video Player
=======================

Publishers love embedding auto-playing videos these days, which isn't
really popular. You'll find mulitple forum, Reddit, HN, or Twitter
threads about it.

To make it somehow worse...when you scroll down, you think it would
leave you as it leaves the viewport. No. It detaches, shrinks and
pins itself to the bottom right of your screen and continues playing.
It keeps the distraction going and as if teasing you, features a
microscopic 'X' button with a tiny hit area (violating Fitts's Law).

NDTV's homepage
<https://thatshubham.com/img/autoplay.webp>

Autoplaying videos are commonplace these days.

You can bet the people measuring metrics boast about video pre-roll
ads having the highest CPMs or whatever.

Note:

If your market research team absolutely insists on having one,
utilize the IntersectionObserver API. If the user scrolls past the
video, pause it and respect their choice of non-interaction.

Innovative Hindrances
=====================

On mobile, vertical space is your most precious commodity. The
average mobile viewport is about 800px high. And many news sites
utilize a sticky header (with the logo and hamburger menu) that
consumes 80-100px. Add a sticky share bar along with the mobile
browser's own URL bar and navigation buttons and you have reduced
space for content even further.

[Ads and Modals: 89%] vs [Content: 11%] <https://thatshubham.com/img/guardian.webp>

The actual content on this Guardian webpage is limited to 11% of the
viewport. And this does not account for the browser navigation bar on
an actual phone.

Expert Comment
==============

When designers are encouraged to optimize for newsletter signups,
text signups, or registrations at all costs, they sometimes make
decisions that prioritize those metrics over all else. However,
in the long run, these tactics erode users' trust and their
relationship to the brand. --NNgroup [Source]

User's actual reading window is now a claustrophobic slit in the
center of their phone. It creates a feeling of visual suffocation.
They are forced to scroll 3x more often thereby increasing the
interaction cost.

Then there is the fat-finger tax. 'X' buttons immediately adjacent to
ad hit-boxes is a calculated mathematical risk by ad-ops teams to
generate accidental clicks. These close buttons can easily be bigger, especially on mobile screens but they're not. Feature, not bug
terrority.

Hall of fame: Jagran
<https://thatshubham.com/img/j1.webp>

Highlighted in red boxes - Open in App obstruction, Modal to
subscribe, advert and share section.

Highlighted in green box - Actual content

I grew up reading Dainik Jagran, it used to be one of India's most
popular Hindi daily in print. And this is their website today. The
tiny sliver of content is masked behind not one but two z-index
warfare modules. A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from
accessing them by pestering them with their "apps" these days. I
don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download
your app comes from.

Another recent peculiarity of the modern news websites is the
truncation of articles halfway through with a "Read More" or
"Continue Reading" button. A click event tells the publisher which
articles are driving engagement and gives them an opportunity to load
more adverts further down the page.

Note:

Unless the user is actively navigating, the header is dead weight.
The header should hide on scrollDown and reveal on scrollUp. Let the
content breathe.

Better is possible
==================

As a publisher, you can't force a user through 3-4 dismissive actions
before content is properly visible and expect the experience to be
appreciated. Doing so is equivalent to burning your user's cognitive
budget before value is delivered. The business excuse of, "We need
compliance and lead generation" doesn't end up benefiting the user.
If they haven't read a single word of your journalism, why would they
subscribe to you?

Fix it by giving zero pop-ups before 60 seconds of dwell time or 50%
scroll depth. Instead of allowing independent third-party scripts to
inject uncoordinated overlays, engineers must enforce a serialized
onboarding queue one overlay at a time, triggered by behavior and not
by page load. Create non-obtrusive accessible modals. If you have to,
combine the cookie consent and the newsletter ask into a single,
non-blocking bottom section. If a user dismisses it, save the state
to localStorage and never show it on the same session.

Or better yet, inject the newsletter signup as a styled,
non-intrusive div between paragraphs 4 and 5. If the user has
scrolled that far, they are engaged. Not only does the user's
interaction cost drop, the conversion rates might actually increase
because the intent aligns with the action.

Note:

If ad refreshing is required, use lazy loading ads tied to scroll
depth (e.g. refreshing slots when the user scrolls 50vh past them)
rather than halting the reading experience.

Coming back to CLS, when we read, our brains map the spatial location
of the text. When a layout shifts unexpectedly, it destroys the
user's spatial memory. The cognitive load required to re-find your
place breaks the state of flow.

As a publisher, you must reserve space for asynchronous content. Wrap
ad-slots and images in a container with a defined aspect-ratio or
fixed min-height. If the slot is designated for a 300x250 medium
rectangle, the container can be hardcoded to:

min-height: 250px; background: var(--skeleton-loader);

or something. When the ad loads, the DOM doesn't move. If the ad
fails to fill, collapse the container using something like
ResizeObserver if it is outside the current viewport. But avoid
pushing text down after the user has begun reading.

Note:

Google ought to have some mechanism to differentiate news articles
that are completely paywalled in their search results.

Sanity still exists
===================

text.npr.org
<https://thatshubham.com/img/npr.webp>

A lightweight text-only version of NPR with no bloat, tracking and
modals.

Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and
www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there. And RSS feeds do too. A
vibrant community of feed readers serve millions of people daily.
Subscribe to your choice of news publisher without the overbearing
modal attack or persistent tracking.

Existence of these proves that an audience longs for the kind of
no-frills content-heavy websites that are often romanticized these
days. In an era where so much is happening around your country and
the world, and internet being so invasive in our lives, we ought to
have better outlets with both business and user needs meeting at a
middle ground.

At the end of the day
=====================

Good UX is highly desired and once you get it right, it feels almost
natural, intuitive. The current state of news UI assumes that the
reader is an adversary to be trapped and monetized. Choosing between
a profitable publication and a fast, accessible user experience is
not an either-or decision. I guarantee you the engineers at these
publications hate this as much as we do, but they are trapped by
business models that prioritize short-term CPMs over long-term
readership. We just need to stop letting third-party marketing
scripts dictate the website's architecture.

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.

They built a system that treats your attention as an extractable
resource. The most radical thing you can do is refuse to be
extracted. Close the tab. Use RSS. Let the bounce rate speak for
itself. These are vanity metrics until enough people stop vanishing
into them and then suddenly they become a crisis.

It is working perfectly for the people who built it this way. The
question is whether it is working for you.

About the Author
================

I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing
hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension
with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently
looking for my next role. If your team needs an engineer who cares as
much about the Network Tab as they do about User Empathy, let's talk.

From: <https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit>

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)