The Adaptive Marketer

Eric Schmidt and my tests on newspaper load times

Posted on 07. Apr, 2009 by Robert Rose in Uncategorized

I was reading on the ClickZ blog about Eric Schmidt (CEO Of Google) speaking at the Newspaper Association of America convention today.  As ClickZ put it "Eric
Schmidt went out of his way to make nice with newspapers — even as
those same papers railed against Google
for leading Web users to dissociate quality content from the publisher
brands that produce it."

But one of the more interesting quotes that Schmidt had was

"My own bias, by the way, is a technology one: I think the sites are
slow. They literally are not fast. They're actually slower than reading
the paper, and that's something that can be worked on on a technical
basis."

So, are page load times really a factor or not.  I went out and performed a (highly) unscientific experiment and went to Pingdom and loaded up the top ten largest newspapers in the United States.

Here are the results

Google.com 0.3 Seconds
News.Google.com – 1.6 Seconds
USAToday – 2.8 Seconds
New York Times – 2.7 Seconds
New York Post -  3.6 Seconds
Wall Street Journal -  3.6 Seconds
LA Times -  3.8 Seconds
Houston Chronicle – 4.3 Seconds
Washington Post 4.5 Seconds
Denver Post – 4.8 Seconds
Chicago Tribune – 7.1 Seconds
San Francisco Chronicle – 7.1 Seconds
New York Daily News – 7.5 Seconds

So, yeah, it would seem that compared to News.Google.com – that newspaper sites are a little slower.   And, sheesh, what's up with the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Daily News.

But then, just for fun I tried a few more sites out and got this:

MySpace.com – 1.9 Seconds
IBM.com – 5.7 Seconds
Microsoft.com – 4.3 Seconds
CNN.com – 7.7 Seconds

So, TV news certainly not doing any better – and IBM and Microsoft are right in that same range.  MySpace seemed pretty impressive.

Anyway… Admittedly very unscientific – and I'll let you come to your own conclusions – but interesting nonetheless.