Total download size of *initial* page of major websites

Question

I'm quite surprised how large some major websites homepages are. This is the total amount downloaded just when opening the homepage.

cnn.com - 845kb
microsoft.com - 470kb
yahoo.com - 235kb
gillette.com (flash) - 3.8Mb
abc.com - 3.4Mb
nbc.com - 1.4Mb
youtube.com - 530kb

Anyone care to add to the list? I'm just trying to justify the size of a site by comparing it to major sites out there. Obviously some of these sites are quite media intensive and wouldn't be much fun at 200kb. Im quite surprised how huge some sites actually are.

To do this I used fiddler. Clear your cache first, go to the site, select all the items in fiddler and under the 'statistics' tab it will show the total.

Answer 1

You shouldn't need another site to justify the size of yours. Just because your site is not as big as, say, nbc.com, does not mean that the size is ok. You should still be trying to make it as small as possible.