“Page Weight Matters”, 2012-12-21 (; backlinks; similar):
[Google engineer recounts the results of heavily optimizing YouTube to make it usable in slow Third World Countries: in an example of Jevons Paradox & Simpson’s Paradox, he found that despite making YouTube better for all users, average page load time got worse—because now Africans were actually able to use it.]
When we plotted the data geographically and compared it to our total numbers broken out by region, there was a disproportionate increase in traffic from places like Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and even remote regions of Siberia. Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under [the optimized version] Feather was over 2 minutes! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than 20 minutes to load! This was the penalty incurred before the video stream even had a chance to show the first frame. Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything. Under Feather, despite it taking over 2 minutes to get to the first frame of video, watching a video actually became a real possibility. Over the week, word of Feather had spread in these areas and our numbers were completely skewed as a result. Large numbers of people who were previously unable to use YouTube before were suddenly able to.
Through Feather, I learned a valuable lesson about the state of the Internet throughout the rest of the world. Many of us are fortunate to live in high bandwidth regions, but there are still large portions of the world that do not. By keeping your client side code small and lightweight, you can literally open your product up to new markets.
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