[drewcrawford]

> In finding solutions, The Post doesn’t want to sacrifice ad revenue. Nor does it want to give up much of the valuable marketing information that comes from the tracking of your reading habits.

Translation: You're not the customer, you're the product.

I've seen this story too many times: We want high performance, AND we want a simple user interface, AND we want these 20 features, and we will not listen to the tech guys who tell us we can't have it all. Something has to give.

[rjd]

I worked for a major news agency recently and speed/page weight where two things we worked damned hard to tackle.

The publishing frameworks are to blame on the most part. We spent 6 months working on caching fixes to deal with that. The site is still pathetically slow even after 6 months, my suggestion to management was throw the baby out with bath water and migrate to a new bespoke purpose fit solution. But that option scares the hell of out management (especially when they are generally sales men).

Caching aside the rest come from tracking software. Infact from time to time neilson would add 50% load time a page, google analytics was only slightly better, but I have watched nelson hang a page for 30 seconds. Even with delayed loading, browsers are horribly unruly beasts :)

The sad fact is demographics are everything, without it the news site doesn't exist. You need to be able to go to market and say we have X demographic give us that huge client spend. Which for the uninitiated one sale can be more than what an entire months of Google ads will bring in.

So the comment is 100% correct, news sites are in the business of tracking you. Because without it people won't spend with them, and Google ads won't even cover hosting costs let alone paying journalists to cover stories. Big media is extremely expensive to produce, its not like some aggregator site like Digg or Reddit which get stories for free, you need to be able to send people to location, put them up in hotels, feed them etc...

And with that knowledge there is no way in hell that could could ever make an argument to remove those tracking scripts :/

[quanticle]

In the context of the Post, these are excuses. They even admit that their site loads more slowly than all of their competitors. What does the Post's site do that the New York Times, Guardian, and Reuters don't?

[mattdeboard]

Sounds like the WaPo site has ceased being a website and become a bikeshed, instead.