“Loading the front page of a major newspaper now downloads 49 megabytes for less than 4kb of actual article text.”
The economics of online publishing produced a system where the article is a host body for a tracking parasite roughly 12,000 times its size. Every analytics package, every ad network, every personalization engine adds a few more megabytes. The average reader on average bandwidth experiences this as the page is broken. The publishers experience it as a metric on a dashboard nobody reads.