Large news websites have big budgets and lots of resources, so why is it that Legible News is so much faster? The short answer is that we’re leaving a lot of money on the table by not annoying you with ads and we don’t overdo it in the graphics department. This approach is fundamentally at odds with the way most news websites make money.
No third party advertisements or tracking
Did you know when you visit most news websites, a quick auction takes place before the page is shown to you? Third party advertisement networks sell your eyeballs to the highest bidder during a brief moment of time before the news is shown to you.
Legible News is unique because it does not have any third-party advertisements or analytics. Your information is kept private and not sold to the highest bidder. This gives us a huge advantage against large news websites for speed. The trade-off is that we have to make enough money from our Plus subscription to keep the lights on, so please consider subscribing if you like fast, private news.
Less is more
As of June 2022, CNN.com downloads over 8.9 megabytes of images, videos, and advertisements. With an ad blocker, CNN.com still downloads an incredible 2.4 megabytes of data. All that heft means you have to wait longer for everything to download over the Internet, then wait for your browser to process it all and display it on screen.
Compare that to Legible News, which only has to download 0.4 megabytes worth of stuff as ofe June 2022. This means less time is spent transfering content over the Internet and the browser can display it much faster since there’s less work to do to process it all. The trade-off of course is that Legible News is much more boring than other news websites, but its worth it if you like reading without being distracted by videos and images.
What gets measured gets managed
Running large websites is hard. Like anything, overtime a lot of cruft tends to build up which slows things down. That’s why Legible News regularly measures how fast it is compared to other major news websites with The Speed Report.