[primeradical]

Took a look at the dev console, there are 2 tracking scripts, segment and CNN specific one. Those take up the majority of bandwidth. There's also a separate CSS style sheet. The main DOM and the stylesheet are <10% of the total bytes transferred. The favicon is the same byte size as the entire DOM.

Don't think there is necessarily a consideration of byte cost, given the size of the tracking scripts. A few lines to make this manageable on wide monitors aren't prohibitive for those users.

[Jtsummers]

Ouch, I'm surprised they added those. Definitely defeats the original purpose of these low-bandwidth sites.

[tpmx]

It doesn't - it's still pretty compact. Would still be pretty compact after adding ~30 bytes for making it work well with large screens.