Living in Melbourne for almost one year now it is pretty common for me to read Fairfax Media’s publications, especially The Age, a very popular Melbournian newspaper. I believe it’s the most informative general news periodic I’ve read around here. Reading its online version is always a painful experience though. I’m no user experience expert but as an exercise I decided to evaluate some aspects of that website and compare it against a global reference.

Page Real State

Now, when it comes to online newspapers my reference is The New York Times, an extremely traditional newspaper with a relevant online presence. Some may say it is not fair to compare such an influential vehicle with a national newspaper but the goal here is not to find the best website -NYT wins, hands down- but to benchmark and see how large is the gap between both in several aspects I find interesting.

Here’s a page with some news about the Tokyo share market. The green shapes are over what is the actual content, the remainder of the page is composed of menus, related content and ads.

Now let’s take a look at the same news at theage.com (actually BusinessDay.com.au, Fairfax’s business news site that The Age links to).

You can argue that the New York Times talks to a market that is extremely interested in the financial crisis, thus the coverage needs to have quality and go way deeper than anywhere else’s newspaper. That’s fair enough, but take a look at a Brazilian website with the same news (in Portuguese).

Disclaimer: I used to work for this company

Anyway, I’m not talking about volume or quality of content here; I’m paying attention in screen real state and reading ergonomics. Banners are necessary –and can be non-intrusive or even useful- and related content may be useful but the experience in that site is really awkward. It’s amazing how the website for a big newspaper has a layout that makes those giveaway papers they distribute in the sidewalks look like professional stuff.

Note: Thumbs were created using the awesome online service thumablizr

Banners

nytimes.com has more content and less noise. Of course that the price of each banner in that site -IBM and Sprint were the most popular banners while I was writing this article- is probably way higher than the price you’d pay in theage.com.au -ANZ Bank, Melbourne City Council, Dell, Nicks.com.au, Credit World and millionairephenomena.com(!)- but that may mean that banners are not the ideal media for local newspapers in Australia -or at least in Melbourne, Melbournians are very peculiar.

A positive note about all sites is that they use Google ads. Not because of Google itself but because these three companies are traditional media conglomerates trying to create their space in the Internet and I know how hard it is for traditional media people to understand that in the web it may be a huge advantage to not manage or sell ads by yourself but just receive the money.

Actually looks like nytimes.com goes all-Google with banners provided by Double-Click. Globo.com, G1’s umbrella portal, runs its own ads system.

Looking at the front-end after a couple of tries, it looks like Fairfax has a nice mix of vendors. It uses Microsoft Atlas as a service for its main banner (the one that won’t let you read the text) and Atlas AdManager for its right side sponsored links–probably running in their own servers, as it’s under a Fairfax.com.au domain. They use Google/Double Click for the top and right side banners.

A funny thing is that Google’s sponsored links in the bottom of the page are just below a box with other set of sponsored links that appears to be generated using some Microsoft sponsored links engine running locally. Both tend to show relevant links but I wonder the impact of this cannibalisation in the click-through rate.

As a side note, about an year ago I’ve read a mini study by Serverdome on this topic. I got really surprise by how some high-profile bloggers actually don’t have a lot of ads in their sites, according t the study the average would be something around 15% of the total space. To be fair, the study didn’t include “related content” and other navigation aids and these are probably what drive me mad with theage.com.au, but it’s still interesting.

Page Performance

Getting into the more geeky stuff, I wonder how theage.com.au performs in some web-development metrics analysis.

That nytimes.com page gets an F from YSlow. The tool’s grade is not the best metric in the world but it gives some good tips. For some odd reason looks like the newspaper doesn’t minify JavaScript (34K in a single file). They don’t gzip some components of the page but based on the weird URIs those have -including one that ends in .asp- I reckon that may be a systems integration problem. In the end the whole page is about 492.2K with an empty browser cache and 161.9K with cached content.

The Brazilian page G1 gets an F as well. Pretty much same problems: no minified JavaScript (14K larger .js file) and some non-gzip’ed JavaScript files. It does way better in download total tough: 183.2K in an empty cache and 38.2K with cached content.

theage.com.au gets the third F. Fairfax’s newspaper has non-gzipped content and could minify JavaScript better. I think it may be not a fair critic as the largest JavaScript file I found has 5K. The problem is the download size, with 472K for an empty cache and 125K with cached content. Also I’m not sure if it’s network delay, download size or intentional behavior but the website does some funny AJAX that rearranges elements when you are reading, and that sucks.

So, to receive 11 paragraphs in theage.com.au you download pretty much the same volume as to read 22 paragraphs (plus a graph) in nytimes.com.

Conclusion

It is good to see traditional media companies like Fairfax going digital. As I said previously I know it’s not easy to convince people used to bill both advertisers and consumers for the same content to enter a world where content that is not officially free is easily downloaded from a torrent website.

As a technologist, I’m aware of the difficulties one has hiring and keeping a software development staff with experience in real-world digital media. Must developers are used to write web applications and not websites with millions of users every day. Their magic tricks often don’t work well in this scenario.

That said, that’s not that hard to find help to solve the issues pointed out here. Usability is a pretty well known science nowadays and there are dozens of techniques and patterns to minimise the download problem.