Stuart Breckenridge noticed something beautiful: PC Gamer published an article recommending RSS readers. The page weighs 37MB on initial load. Then it kept going — downloading nearly half a gigabyte of ad content within five minutes of sitting open in a tab.
Let that sink in. A single article about tools that exist specifically to escape bloated web pages is itself a masterclass in why those tools are necessary. You can't write satire this good.
The experience of actually visiting the page is a gauntlet: notification popup, newsletter popup obscuring the content, dimmed background, at least five visible ads before you reach any editorial content. Once past the welcome mat, you get a title, a subtitle, and five more ads. The article text — the ostensible reason the page exists — is the smallest thing on it.
As one HN commenter pointed out, 37MB is roughly the size of a full Windows 95 installation. The subsequent 500MB of ad downloads means that in five minutes, your browser fetched roughly 13 copies of Windows 95. To read a listicle about RSS readers.
The likely culprit is autoplaying video ads, which continuously stream new content as long as the tab is open. This isn't unique to PC Gamer — it's the logical endpoint of a publishing model where editorial content is a vehicle for ad impressions rather than the other way around. Lyrics sites, news outlets, recipe blogs — the pattern is everywhere. PC Gamer just happened to create the most ironic version of it.
With uBlock Origin enabled, the same page loads at 5.6MB and stops. That's still heavy for what amounts to a short list with screenshots, but it's a 94% reduction. The delta between those two numbers — 5.6MB vs 500MB+ — is the tax readers pay for not running an ad blocker.
This is the real argument for RSS, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia. RSS strips pages down to what you actually came for: the text. No popups, no autoplay, no half-gigabyte ad payloads silently running in background tabs. The format is 25 years old and still solves a problem that gets worse every year.
If you're a developer who hasn't set up an RSS reader yet, PC Gamer just made the case better than any recommendation list could — by accident.
The title buried the lede.> In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.I’m guessing this is due to autoplaying videos. *500 MB* in 5 minutes.37 MB is petite compared to that.
To use a good point of reference that I've seen others also start using lately, an installation of Windows 95 is roughly 40MB, so in loading that page you've downloaded approximately one Windows 95 installation. Then another 10+ times with the 500MB more that came after.
In Firefox + Unlock Origin: Downloads 5.6MB and then stops loading.Scrolling to the bottom of the page added 3MB of images and then stopped loading.
I have no metrics but there is a lot (if not most of) sites with similar issues.A simple site of lyrics, or newspapers that start videos automatically. Github was worse, now at least opens a bit more faster, but still very poorer than, example, codeberg. Sites are sites, most want to do fancy things
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It's not just "PC Gamer" but people making decisions behind as always. Three first people from their "Meet the Team" page [0]: Tim Clark — Brand Director (@timothydclark), Evan Lahti - Strategic Director (@elahti), Phil Savage — Global Editor-in-Chief (@Octaeder). Hopefully