A single PC Gamer article about RSS readers triggered over 431 network requests and transferred 5.5 MB of data within 60 seconds. The irony? The actual content was about 10-15 KB of text and 150 KB of images. Simon Willison highlighted this performance audit after Stuart Breckenridge first flagged that the article kept downloading data, eventually ballooning to hundreds of megabytes.
The numbers are staggering. Over 82% of all network traffic came from ad-tech, tracking scripts, and programmatic advertising. In Firefox, autoplay video carousels pushed the total past 200 MB. A page that could weigh under 200 KB instead consumed more than 1,000 times that amount.
What the Audit Found
Simon Willison used Claude Code with a tool called Rodney to investigate the page in detail. The breakdown tells a familiar but still shocking story:
- Core content: ~10-15 KB of text, ~150 KB of images
- Actual transfer: 5.5 MB within 60 seconds (18.8 MB decoded)
- Network requests: 431+ in the first minute
- Firefox total: 200+ MB due to autoplay video ads
- Ad-tech share: 82%+ of all transferred bytes
The article that triggered all this? A guide recommending RSS readers. The format exists specifically to help people avoid exactly this kind of web bloat.
Why This Matters
This isn’t just a PC Gamer problem. It’s the state of ad-supported publishing in 2026. Most major media sites run similar ad-tech stacks, and the performance tax falls entirely on readers. Slower load times, drained batteries, burned mobile data, and a degraded reading experience.
For web developers and product teams, audits like this one are a useful reality check. The ratio here (content representing less than 1% of total page weight) shows how far the balance has tipped. Every additional tracking pixel, video preload, and programmatic auction adds milliseconds and megabytes that compound fast.
What You Can Do With This
If you run a content site, this audit is worth studying as a mirror. A few practical takeaways:
- Audit your own pages. Tools like Chrome DevTools, WebPageTest, or similar AI-assisted approaches can reveal how much of your page weight comes from third-party scripts versus actual content.
- Lazy-load aggressively. Video carousels that autoplay on page load are the single biggest offender here.
- Question every script. If 82% of your network traffic isn’t serving your readers, it’s serving someone else at your readers’ expense.
- Consider the irony test. If your content actively contradicts your page’s behavior, readers will notice. And they’ll screenshot it.
The Bigger Picture
What stands out here isn’t the specific numbers. It’s that this kind of bloat has become so normalized that a major publisher can ship a 200+ MB page without anyone internally flagging it. The web has a weight problem, and ad-tech is the primary driver.
Simon Willison’s audit approach is also worth noting. Using an AI agent to systematically analyze page performance is a practical use case that more developers should consider. The full prompt and methodology are available at the original source for anyone who wants to replicate the analysis on their own sites.