Global Trends

Irritation Became the Business Model

Opening the New York Times homepage downloads 49 megabytes of data. Four hundred twenty-two network requests fire before the

By Conor Healy

April 2, 2026

Opening the New York Times homepage downloads 49 megabytes of data. Four hundred twenty-two network requests fire before the page settles. Two minutes pass from click to readable. The entire Windows 95 operating system fit on 28 floppy disks totalling 40 megabytes. A news homepage in 2026 is larger than an operating system from 1995.

The Guardian mobile site shows article text in 11% of the screen. The other 89% is ads, newsletter prompts, links to unrelated articles, and autoplay videos. Four lines of text visible at once. Scroll down, four more lines appear along with three new obstacles to click through or wait out.

Web advertising broke news websites. Not by accident. By design. Publishers optimize for “viewability” and “time on page” because those metrics determine CPM rates in ad auctions. Higher viewability means higher bids. Longer time on page signals engaged users worth more to advertisers. So publishers add obstacles. Slow load times. Interstitial modals. Autoplay videos. Repeated ads. Newsletter signup forms. Anything to keep you trapped on the page longer counts as engagement.

Your frustration is the product.

The Auction Runs Before You Read

Web advertising operates through real-time auctions. When you click a news link, your browser loads the article HTML. Then JavaScript runs dozens of ad network scripts. Each script phones home with data about you. Your location. Your browsing history. On your device. The page URL. Advertising exchanges run auctions using this data. Hundreds of advertisers bid on the chance to show you an ad. The highest bidder wins. Their ad loads in the slot. All of this happens before you read the first paragraph.

The median web page in 2026 is 2.6 megabytes. The 90th percentile hits 10 megabytes. JavaScript weight is up 28% since 2022. None of this serves readers. It serves ad auction infrastructure. The Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and New Yorker all load faster in their RSS feeds than on their actual websites. RSS is text and images. No auctions. No tracking scripts. Zerosponsored content disguised as articles.

Some publishers figured this out and built lightweight alternatives. text.npr.org strips everything except article text. lite.cnn.com does the same. Both load in under one second. Both deliver news without obstacles. Neither makes the money the full sites make because neither runs the auction infrastructure required for programmatic advertising.

Viewability Decides Who Gets Paid

Advertisers pay for viewable impressions. An ad is viewable if 50% of its pixels appear on screen for one second. Display ads need one second. Video ads need two seconds. Pay for ads people see instead of ads that load below the fold and never scroll into view.

Publishers responded by engineering pages to maximize viewability at the expense of readability. Sticky headers that follow you down the page. Ads that reload as you scroll. Infinite scroll that keeps loading new ad slots. Interstitial modals that force interaction before you can keep reading. Every tactic designed to increase the chances an ad stays on screen for that crucial one second.

High viewability rates command higher CPMs. Publishers with 80% viewability can charge 30% to 50% more per thousand impressions than publishers with 50% viewability. The math is simple. A publisher earning $5 CPM at 50% viewability makes $2.50 per thousand page views. Increase viewability to 80% and CPM jumps to $7. Same traffic, $5.60 per thousand page views instead of $2.50. That’s 124% more revenue from the same users.

So publishers slow down page loads. Not accidentally. Deliberately. Ads that load late still count as served impressions if they eventually become viewable. Slow sites trap users who wait for content to appear. Every second of delay is another chance for an ad to hit that one-second viewability threshold.

The Same Ad Eight Times

Open an article on Apple News. Scroll down. The same Audien hearing aid ad appears between paragraphs two and three. Scroll more. Same ad between paragraphs five and six. Keep scrolling. It shows up eight times in one article. Same blonde woman. Same product. Identical call to action. Eight times.

Repetition is deliberate. Each instance counts as a separate impression. Eight impressions means eight chances at viewability. Maybe you scrolled past the first one before it registered as viewable. The second one caught you mid-scroll. Viewable impression counted. Publisher gets paid. Advertiser wastes money showing you the same ad eight times. Nobody cares because the incentives don’t align with user experience.

Print publications would never do this. The New Yorker print edition is respectful. Clean layouts. Ads clearly distinguished from editorial content. No intrusive elements interrupting articles mid-paragraph. The New Yorker website has autoplay videos between paragraphs. The videos are unrelated to the article you’re reading. They autoplay with sound muted. You pause them. Scroll down. Another video autoplays. This would be unthinkable in print.

The Wall Street Journal print edition is a masterclass in information density and readability. The website is a maze of paywalls, newsletter prompts, and sponsored content labeled “What to Read Next” that links to articles about investing in crypto written by advertisers. Print Journal readers pay subscription fees for quality. Web Journal readers are products sold to advertisers.

No Engineer Decided This

Nobody woke up and decided to make news websites unreadable. Web advertising created an incentive structure where rational individual decisions produced a collectively insane outcome. Each stakeholder optimizes for their metrics. Ad networks optimize for fill rates and CPMs. Publishers optimize for viewability and time on page. Advertisers optimize for conversions and ROAS. Users want to read articles.

The first three groups have metrics and money. The fourth group has frustration. Guess who loses.

Engineers build features their managers request. Managers respond to analytics showing low viewability hurts revenue. Analytics teams measure what ad networks report. Ad networks benefit from longer page load times and more impression opportunities. The feedback loop runs on money, not user satisfaction. Changing it requires changing how web advertising auctions work.

Publishers know this. The Guardian screenshot showing 11% article text on mobile isn’t a bug. It’s optimization. The page served its business purpose. Ads loaded. Viewability thresholds met. CPM earned. That the reader saw four lines of text is irrelevant to the system rewarding the publisher.

When Money Decided Everything

Programmatic advertising reached $595 billion globally in 2024. Projected to hit $800 billion by 2028. The scale is enormous. Publishers depend on it. Subscriptions work for outlets with brand loyalty. The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers generating $2.3 billion annually. Most publishers don’t have that. They have web advertising paying $0.50 to $12 CPM depending on placement quality and audience demographics.

The economics work if you accept that readers are products. A publisher with one million monthly users at $5 average CPM generates $5,000 monthly assuming users view one page each. To reach $50,000 monthly revenue, the publisher needs either 10 million users or 10 page views per user. Getting 10 page views per user is easier than getting 10 million users. So publishers engineer infinite scroll. “You might also like” links. Autoplaying videos. Related articles sections. Anything to increase page views per session.

Time on page became a proxy for engagement. Publishers gaming the metric created the current web landscape. Pages that take two minutes to load force users to wait. Waiting is engagement. Modals requiring interaction force engagement. Autoplaying videos force engagement. Repeated ads across eight paragraphs force engagement. None of it serves readers. All of it serves the auction systems paying publishers.

Publishers Are Trapped

Ad blocking is at 42.7% globally. Every user who installs an ad blocker removes themselves from the advertising inventory pool. Publishers respond by making experiences more hostile to extract more value from non-blocking users. Increased ads. More aggressive formats. More obstacles. This drives more users to ad blockers. Death spiral.

Subscriptions don’t work for most publishers. The New York Times has 10 million paying subscribers. Most outlets don’t have that brand loyalty. The Washington Post lost $100 million in 2023. The Los Angeles Times laid off 20% of staff in 2024. Publishers can’t charge readers enough to cover costs. Web advertising is the only option. Web advertising requires hostile user experiences to hit viewability metrics that determine CPM rates.

The viewability requirements made sense initially. Pay for ads people see, not ads that load off-screen. But implementing viewability as a CPM multiplier created incentives to maximize screen time through any means necessary. Publishers responded rationally. They made websites slower, added more obstacles, increased page views per session through aggressive internal linking and infinite scroll.

The New York Times homepage is 49 megabytes because web advertising economics require it. The Guardian mobile page shows 11% article text because that generates maximum ad revenue. Engineers didn’t decide this. Money did.